ccTLDs

The first question I get asked is: Why should I care about ccTLDs? The standard answer is brand awareness but it goes much further.

The first reason to register ccTLDs and set up a foreign website is communication with foreign customers. It is currently estimated that 75% of Internet traffic is carried out in English, the remaining 25% has enormous business generating potential. As the Internet expands, the number of non-English websites will also increase an example of this is being seen in Europe and Latin America, for example. Germany and the U.K. each have already over 1 million registrations of their primary ccTLDs and the number of Latin American ccTLDs are growing but at a slower pace. Latin American leaders in domain registration include Argentina has over 150,000 and Brazil has 60,000.

The second reason to register other country-code level domains is that you can then secure your trademark or brand name, slogan, as a domain name while it is still available. The advantages of having one single recognized name or mark are obvious. Secondly, securing the ccTLDs in the countries where you want to do business will prevent others from making money off your brand recognition. If Internet Brand Name building is used with trademark registration, the results can be powerful.

Failure to register other country level domains can be costly. An example, Hooters neglected to register the domain name Hooter.nl. The domain name was registered by a group with no ties to Hooters.com, but which used the name recognition to lure customers to its copycat website. Hooters.com filed suit to regain use of the name and associated Netherlands ccTLDs. The amount of money Hooters.com has expended in legal costs against these cyber squatters could have been avoided had the domain name and ccTLD been secured by Hooters.com initially. We have seen companies pay upwards of a $1,000,000.00 to get a name back that if they had registered in the beginning would have only cost several hundreds.

If you are planning any type of international e-commerce, map out your domain name strategy first. Obtaining a good domain name is the first step in establishing a presence on the Internet. If you have several product brand names which you want international recognition for, you should consider registering domain names with all the appropriate ccTLDs covering those as well.