[busted]

It's kind of amazing that very few of what you would naively expect to be the "best" domain names, especially for selling things, are actually home to successful business. Things like shoes.com, pizza.com, clothes.com, beer.com, programming.com, they're all failed or nothing. Others (books.com, computers.com) just redirect to websites that are closely or tangentially related.

[rdtsc]

Many of those come from a different time - the dot com boom era. Then owning the right domain meant you were 80% there. Needless to say money, effort, and time was spent getting the right domain without then leading to profits. One reason for that logic was discoverability. Before Google was Google how would you buy shoes? Well of course go to your swanky new Netscape browser and type "shoes.com".

Funny now you still go to the address bar and type "shoes" but you don't go to shoes.com but to Google who tells you where to go buy shoes

[iak8god]

In retrospect I'm surprised that anyone thought it would work this way once search became a viable way of navigating the web. I've never bought shoes IRL from a place named "Shoe Store". Following the address metaphor, I've also never gone looking for "Shoe Sreet" to buy my shoes.

[ehnto]

It may be my experience from working in ecommerce and rubbing shoulders with SEO companies, but I am initially skeptical of simple domain names. Bestshoes.com? No brand, just a domain name probably picked out by an SEO mage. I would have to do my due diligence before purchasing. Sometimes I wouldn't be bothered and I would go to a brand I recall from real life.

I used to help run an online bodybuilding supplement company, and some of the shifty domains the SEO guy cooked up that people trusted blew my mind. Bestweightlosssupplements dot com. Perfect, let me pop my CC details into that site.

[emodendroket]

One thing I see a lot on HN is programmers and other highly technical users assuming their behavior reflects typical user behavior. That is quite often simply not the case.

[ehnto]

I would definitely not be surprised if that were shown to me. I guess that's why we do A/B testing and other confirmations of our assumptions. Things that seem like they wouldn't work often do, like making a button green, or making the checkout two steps instead of one increasing conversion.

Humans are wierd.

[user5994461]

It's funny you'd say that, because all train stations are in "train's street" in some countries, and in London most banks are in "Bank street" :D

[ehnto]

A nuance of my city is that Bank Street leads to the train station, and no longer has a bank on it!

[iak8god]

Sure, but which came first, trains or the street name? Maybe Zappos should get Shoes.com just for being where the shoes are at :)

[tyingq]

To be fair, Google and other search engines encouraged that view for quite some time. Naive treatment of anchor text as context...

Also, I'm pretty sure browsers used to tack on ".com" before the current behavior of passing unadorned strings in the URL bar to the search engine.

[tyingq]

Mystified by the downvote. Matt Cutts talked about the unintentional SEO advantage of exact match domains, publicly, and later they released an algorithm change to fix it.

And, I was "pretty sure", but searched a bit. My memory was right. Browsers used to tack ".com" onto things you would type into the url bar. The search box was separate at the time. Firefox, for example, had a setting called "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" defaulting to "on" that made this the default behavior.

These kind of domains did, at one time, have a notable built-in advantage.

[H4CK3RM4N]

These domains would still have their advantage if they managed to get big before the omnibox took over, wouldn't they?

[tyingq]

If they established a following, yes. Someone mentioned "blinds.com", still #1 for "blinds" in the US. Furniture.com is also ranking well for "furniture". The number one result for "cars" is "cars.com". Hats.com is #2 for "hats", and so forth...

[godzillabrennus]

One theory I'll toss out about these failures is that it's a people problem. They probably have marketing people leading them, hence why they bought such a "great brand". Turning revenue doesn't mean making a profit and without enough focus on tech automating as much as possible the businesses don't survive.

[AdamSC1]

As a 'marketing person' I have to starkly disagree with this theory. No marketing person worth their weight in salt thinks that a generic TLD is a "great brand". Branding is quite specifically a matter of owning mindshare with a unique name or mark that can be easily recalled at a point in a buyer's journey.

Let's not go belittling people because it's not your area of expertise. Plenty of great businesses lead by branding people that don't focus on tech-automation end up succeeding. There is more than one path to success.

Also I suggest you check out the 11 immutable laws of branding by Al Ries, it's basically a branding bible and a short and easy read! Maybe you'll find a few tidbits of use from those 'marketing people' :)

[devoply]

Generic words are not brands. I have no feelings about shoes.com nor can I ever other than I like shoes. I care about certain brand of shoes because they look nice and last a while, i.e. quality. That's why companies fight to keep their brands from becoming generic names.

[gumby]

Indeed, it's a shame that that company Microsoft (remember them? They made a BASIC interpreter for CP/M) chose useless names like Windows and Word.

The string, be it Google (nonsense word, to most people), Windows (generic word), or Apple (real word out of context) is all about what you do with it.

[emodendroket]

Surely this is less common now, but I can remember at one point it was a pretty common behavior to say, "hm, I want some information at shoes" and just try navigating to shoes.com. Probably this became less common because porn advertisers caught on and started redirecting to porn.

[adventured]

Certainly it was expected that that style of navigation would be extremely lucrative. It never turned out that way of course. In large aggregate domain squatters have made some real money over the last 20 years by owning various direct type domains (like weddingshoes.com).

I remember in the mid & late 1990s, during the insane dotcom landgrab, people really believed having that special domain name was everything. At the time, it coincided with people thinking they could build a business overnight and IPO the next week, so having something like Shoes.com to sell to naive investors was crucial. I remember one guy pitching the premise, on CNBC and elsewhere, that he had acquired all the buything.com domains, like buysocks.com, and he was going to build a retailing juggernaut on the back of that.

[emodendroket]

Easy-to-remember domain names are still good. People make a lot of money parking domains and you would expect that to be impossible if they were worthless.

[tonyedgecombe]

For most businesses marketing is far more important than technology.

[paulddraper]

pets.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com

[kombucha2]

Petsovernight.com. Delivering little bundles of love, in a box, directly to your door.

[user5994461]

The domain is a multiplier of revenues.

If you were mediocre at the execution, multiplying peanuts will not save the business.

[ternaryoperator]

On the other hand, wine.com seems to be doing OK. I think the crux of the issue is that a good domain name still needs good brand marketing.

[wink]

Pretty sure bikes.com would be doing just as well (it's Rocky Mountain Bicycles) - and (imho rarely these days) it's one of those were one company just grabbed the domain at the right point in time. If my memory serves me well in the early 00s there were quite some German companies who did this, but usually just redirected to companyname.de.

[emodendroket]

blinds.com is pretty successful and, as far as I can tell, a good place to buy blinds.