Updates to Paid Privacy Protect Service

Our platform changes to support Privacy Protect as a paid service are now live. You can now charge your customers for it and boost your profits!

Privacy Protect – Your Pricing

Due to certain policy changes introduced by ICANN, overhead costs associated with the Privacy Protect service had increased significantly leading us to build this feature which allows you to charge to your customers for it. Over the past few months I have had several discussions with many of you at partner meets, industry events, public forums, social media etc. about Privacy Protection becoming a chargeable service. These discussions led to a series of internal debates where we wrangled over the question of making this product chargeable to you so that we can meet the costs incurred as well as monetize the value in a product that most competitors already charge a fee for.

We have decided to absorb the increased costs of Privacy Protect and are introducing this service absolutely free of cost for you for now, as a sign of the value we place on our business relationship with you.

What this means for you:

You can go ahead and start charging your customers for Privacy Protect services
You will be able to set your selling price on your reseller control panel
Until further notice, Privacy Protect services extended through ResellerClub will remain free for you
If you are a Supersite 2 user, the storefront already supports the changes and you only need to set pricing. See Supersite impact details.
If you are an API user, set pricing through the control panel and update your API calls to start charging your customers. See API impact details.

I strongly suggest that you set your selling price and start charging your customers, so that you can get a clearer picture of the actual demand for the service when it is no longer a free add-on. Besides, most of your competitors offer this as a paid service for as high as $6 per domain per year, I hope you can use this to bolster your profits.

I hope you recognize that continuing to offer Privacy Protect services for free can prove to be economically unviable for us in the long run. While we are currently offering it free of cost to you we cannot discount the possibility of it becoming a paid one in the future. Rest assured, if and when it happens, we will ensure you get at least a month's notice to revise your selling price before we start charging you for it. In the meanwhile, get those cash registers ringing!

Impact on SuperSite users:

The following files will be impacted as part of the changes to the SuperSite to incorporate paid Privacy Protection services. In case you have customized any of these pages, they may break after 16th April, so we suggest that you take a back up and implement your customizations on the revised versions.

Files Changed:
products/domain/domain_registration/check_availability_new/domain_search_result.html products/domain/premium_domain/premiumdomain.html products/domain/domain_registration/check_availibilty/includes/idn_domain_search_blurb.html

New Files Added:
products/domain/domain_registration/check_availibilty/privacy_protect_modal.html products/domain/common/privacy_protect_landing_page.html

Click here to read more

Impact on API Users:

The registration, renewal and transfer API calls have been modified to allow purchase of paid Privacy Protect. You will need to modify your API calls accordingly to ensure you can extend this service to your customers. Please follow this guide to set up your API calls.

Feel free to get in touch with us in case you have any questions regarding this email.

Regards,

Shridhar Luthria
General Manager & Business Head