October 1, 2012
Research from Forrester indicatives 30% of purchasing traffic to ecommerce sites surveyed arrived through the person typing the company's domain name directly into their browser address bar.
Forrester worked with GSI Commerce to examine 77,000 consumer orders made during a two week period earlier this year.
The finding highlights the important nature of companies not only registering a domain name - but the right one. Failure to do so could see visitors seeing nothing, or worse, a cybersquatting page - or even worse, a page published by a malicious third party that contains a virus or other scripting that could compromise the user's computer.
While cybersquatting and other forms of anti-competitive behaviour in relation to domain names is illegal, it can be a lengthy and expensive process to win back control over a name and depending on the circumstances, may not always be fruitful.
For Australian businesses just starting up, the results of the Forrester survey would also seem to indicate that giving careful thought to a business and consequently, domain name, is critical.
For example, given the high levels of type in traffic, a business name should be easy to spell, pronounce and remember. A multiword business name should be registered in domain format without hyphens between the words if possible, as that is how most people type domain names into a browser.
Thought should also be given to the type of extension to be registered. Businesses in Australia primarily focused on the Australian market should register the .com.au version of their names as this extension has the highest awareness and trust locally. A .com version should also be registered if possible given that extension's very high level of awareness globally.
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