Is B2B market being ignored by the domain industry?

[expertc]

Hi,

I am pretty new to this community and if it’s not the right place for this thread, please move it to the correct section.

As I mainly work for B2B, I was really surprised that industrial domains are not of much interest. Meanwhile B2B sector is a huge part of e-Commerce. For example, when I needed domains for the large section in chemical industry, I was very much surprised that all generic co.uk’s are available. Meanwhile .com’s are long gone and point to the large multinationals.

So does the industrial domain market exist in the UK? Are B2B domains considered unimportant compared to short-living affiliate type-ins?

Would be interesting to see what people here think about it.

 

[Systreg]

I can't really answer your questions, the only thing I can think is that chemical names might be hard to monetise, and being chemical names, they will be difficult to spell correctly in many instances, so not much type in traffic for them either, and is perhaps the reason they are still available to register.

My other reason for posting is that I was intrigued to know what B2B was, I hadn't heard of that phrase before you posted it, and Google says:

Business-to-business (B2B) describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer. Contrasting terms are business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-government (B2G).

 

[Edwin]

I certainly believe b2b is important, I have probably 1/3 of my portfolio in the b2b sector. The problem is that the traffic numbers are so minute that it's hard to find any reference to guide you when deciding what to register and what to ignore.

What I mean by that is quite often even a keyphrase that is THE keyphrase for a particular b2b product or service might only get a couple of hundred exact searches a month on the Google keyword tool, so how does somebody outside the industry determine what is worth registering? It's possible, by going niche-by-niche and looking at the terms that the b2b sites themselves are using, but it's much less transparent than in b2c.

You're also right that there are a TON of domains left untouched, probably millions of them, but it's a case of putting in the effort to work out what the terms are and then the investment to buy domains that frankly aren't going to get much if any typeins because the starting point isn't high volume. So the only way to get payback is by selling them. When you can pick up the domain name for a piece of laboratory or industrial equipment for a few pounds, and the equipment itself sells for 10s or 100s of thousands of pounds, perhaps that's not so hard - but so far I haven't seen a flood of enquiries.

All the above pre-supposes I'm not overlooking something huge - if I am, perhaps you'd be kind enough to drop a few more hints?

 

[expertc]

Let’s shed a bit more light on this:

There is probably a very important difference between traffic one gets on the B2C and B2B websites. For example one would not get “accidental” hits on something like dimethylformamide.co.uk simply because none from the general public would ever be interested in it. Therefore almost every hit is targeted, situation which has never been enjoyed by any B2C. At the same time for a company that produces or sells that particular substance each and every lead could be worth tens of thousands.

Simple story, I made a niche website for one of my customers from the chemical industry using a common chemical name domain (something similar to lets say “Acetone”). Then another company approached them, asking if the domain is for sale as they want to put a consumer website with this type of trade name. My customer said OK, we might consider it, here is the price. The person who enquired said: “How!? What?! You should have zillions uniques a day to ask such a price…”. My customers was very surprised and simply told them that it is merely a yearly turnover they receive from the website. So it was like talking in two completely different languages.

P.S. Interestingly enough it’s almost next to impossible to get any decent industrial name in .de, .be, or .nl.

 

[Edwin]

That's why I picked up domains such as Hexane.co.uk or PressureVessel.co.uk. Exactly that logic. The problem remains that the only way to monetize these kinds of domains if you're not already in the industry is through a sale, as they're never going to pay for themselves through parking alone.

 

[accelerator]

The domaining industry is not ignoring B2B, there simply isn't much money in it. We watch domain prices every day, and as soon as a big sale is made, we rush to register similar domains. The simple fact of the matter is that from a business perspective, there aren't compelling reasons to spend a lot of money on B2B domains, and that is borne out by domain name price data.

Rgds