[pwdisswordfish0]

> I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing.

An argument against custom domains being a "premium" feature, then? If you don't have a paid plan, then you have to bring your own domain. Paying gets you the *.example.com status symbol. Makes sense — a custom domain usually requires technical expertise and some amount of inconvenience for users (not unlike a services company that publishes their source code to GitHub, which you can always set up and maintain for yourself, but if you want to use the company's hosted services, then you have to pay). Another part of the value proposition would be, "You're gonna have to spend money one way or another — either to a registrar or to us — so why not let it be us?"

[subpixel]

Not just a status symbol. Small merchants know that customers need to trust who they are paying. When customers see *.commercebrand.com they feel way better than when they are asked to enter their credit card on, say, a sushi restaurant's domain. Hell, so do I.