The account page looks 100% the same as it was, they only changed the header.
Now things look out of place.
Namecheap has rebranded
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. Accounting isn't my thing at all. I recently heard that a previous employer of mine was begging staff to take some leave as all the leave on their books is somehow counted as a debt and it makes the books better if people burn off some of their accrued leave. People were forced to take 2-3 month holidays to clear their 10+ years of leave they had saved up. Quite how the workplace functioned with so many on le…
Prepaid services are technically a debt, but a very low risk one. In contrast, paid leave is a high risk liability - an employee with 4 months accrued leave can quit at any time and they are owed 4 months of pay when they do. (I think the company can opt to pay out their 4 months of leave over the course of 4 months to smooth cash flow issues, but I'm not sure of this.)
Companies allocate money into a contra account (to the leave liability) each period (i.e. monthly) so that its all "accounting money". Otherwise companies would go bankrupt if too many staff took leave at a time.
That is while staff with large leave balances look bad, they don't effect the profitability of the organisation.
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prepaid services are technically a debt, but a very low risk one. In contrast, paid leave is a high risk liability - an employee with 4 months accrued leave can quit at any time and they are owed 4 months of pay when they do. (I think the company can opt to pay out their 4 months of leave over the course of 4 months to smooth cash flow issues, but I'm not sure of this.)
Companies allocate money into a contra account (to the leave liability) each period (i.e. monthly) so that its all "accounting money". Otherwise companies would go bankrupt if too many staff took leave at a time. That is while staff with large leave balances look bad, they don't effect the profitability of the organisation.
In that case there is something I don't understand. If the company has a debt and an offsetting asset pegged specifically to that use, why does it look bad?
If anything, that should look good: "we owe $X to employees at 0bps interest and we have $X in the bank at 40bps."
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#54I think "Register your domains from just $3.98 a year" was better than "The Internet Needs People. To tell stories, open stores and share what matters."
Dirty little secret of the domain registration industry: all the money is in upsells to email, shared hosting, pre-rolled $30 a month shopping carts, etc. Domains themselves are cheap and fairly low margin. You know who buys those comparatively expensive high-margin services? SMB owners and people planning to be one. Suffice it to say that Oprah is slightly more well-known than (pick a tech personage) in that demogra…
>"This is crazy to me as an operator"
But they are in debt, they are in debt with their customers. What would be crazy is to recognise a 5 year service commitment as 1 year. This is no different from how the NYT, The Economist, National Geographic... account for the yearly subs. http://www.fasb.org/revenue_recognition.shtml
Imagine that GoDaddy is acquired by another company, and this other company wants to pivot GoDaddy's business into only hosting. The new owners need to recognise that there is cash in the balance sheet from domain registration services, a service that is yet to be offered. It could even be the case that that cash from domain registrations is no longer in the balance sheet, but has already been distributed as a dividend. If GoDaddy stops providing a service it has committed to, they have to pay back customers. Plain and simple. That to me is a liability, but it is not financial "leverage" or debt as you imply. This liability is noted as "Prepaid revenues" and hence not recognised as financial debt a.k.a leverage.
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#55As patio11 says, the margin on domains are fairly small and so many domain companies survive on the upsells instead. Verisign's current .com price is $7.85 and for .net is $5.62. This is the minimum that the registrars (GoDaddy, NameCheap etc) need to pay - so when you think that NameCheap sometimes sell .coms for $8.95, the margin really is small... especially since I've left out the $0.25 ICANN transaction fee (many companies - GoDaddy aside - include this in the overall price). So a $8.95 .com sale leaves just $0.85.
So it does make sense for domain companies to market themselves as sellers of an online presence, instead of a sub-$10 domain name.
But having said that, the website seems a tad... boilerplate. I thought that big companies were done with rebranding to a Web 2.0 esque corporate web design?
Also the footer is 865 pixels tall on my 1920x1080p screen - does it really need to be that big?
I don't mean to be too critical - I do support the change to selling a 'story' instead of a domain name. But the design just seems... outdated?
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#56Much better, now they just need to get their client interface modernised :)
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#57I think "Register your domains from just $3.98 a year" was better than "The Internet Needs People. To tell stories, open stores and share what matters."
Dirty little secret of the domain registration industry: all the money is in upsells to email, shared hosting, pre-rolled $30 a month shopping carts, etc. Domains themselves are cheap and fairly low margin. You know who buys those comparatively expensive high-margin services? SMB owners and people planning to be one. Suffice it to say that Oprah is slightly more well-known than (pick a tech personage) in that demogra…
As others have said this GAAP/FASB principle makes sense. The only thing I'll add is that you mentioned not being able to ask for that money back. The accounting activity involved in a refund of prepaid liabilities would be to reduce both their cash and their prepaid liabilities. This would be a perfectly sensible transaction, so GoDaddy could certainly accommodate this from an accounting perspective.
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#58Happy NameCheap customer with 35+ domains here. This is the worst redesign I've seen in a long time but has a really well redesigned logo. Sorry. Looks like they're trying to fit their content in one of those Generic Fad Layout Templates you find on ThemeForest. The LOGO is awesome though. ● Registering a domain is now harder. Before I could select a dropdown menu and see all the TLD options. Now I can't. ● Did you k…
As a customer with over 100 domains, the new redesign is quite the eyesore. My main reason for choosing Namecheap was because it was technically designed, minimalistic, and had good prices. The new design says flat hipsterism with a splash of web 2.0 fruityness. It's not in the spirit of Namecheap. Something tells me that this design came from an external source. Why change for changesake? Eek.
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#59I think "Register your domains from just $3.98 a year" was better than "The Internet Needs People. To tell stories, open stores and share what matters."
Dirty little secret of the domain registration industry: all the money is in upsells to email, shared hosting, pre-rolled $30 a month shopping carts, etc. Domains themselves are cheap and fairly low margin. You know who buys those comparatively expensive high-margin services? SMB owners and people planning to be one. Suffice it to say that Oprah is slightly more well-known than (pick a tech personage) in that demogra…
Let me tell you a dirty little Namecheap secret:
We're the company that most people go to because there aren't any upsells.
see you soon? ;)
Re: Namecheap has rebranded
#60I think "Register your domains from just $3.98 a year" was better than "The Internet Needs People. To tell stories, open stores and share what matters."
+1 Anything is better then "The Internet Needs People. To tell stories, open stores and share what matters." Talk about going full-retard. Or full-Oprah. The Internet needs registrars that publish their prices. Ok, I found the pricing page. You have to scroll down to the bottom.
I commented elsewhere that you can find the pricing page. It's not that hidden and the pricing is not super expensive. We're a pretty ethical bunch at Namecheap. We have donated over $200k to EFF in the last 2-3 years and will be doing a similar initiative soon. Give us a try and I think you'll agree.