You know 神州专车(Shen Zhou Zhuan Che) is not a small player if you read that the startup just received a 20 billion CNY line of credit from a bank in China.
Shen Zhou Zhuan Che offers chauffeur-driven car hire for business users. Launched only in January, 2015, the comapny already received Series A and then Series B funding rounds at a total of 800m USD in the same year. The service is already available in more than 50 cities. The company is growing very rapidly.
The company does not seem to own ShenZhouZhuanChe.com or ShenZhouZhuanChe.cn. They are too long anyway. However, how about SZZC.com or SZZC.cn? They are short so should be easy to remember. No, they don’t own these two domain names either, although they can because both domain names are for sale now.
Instead, the company has chosen 10101111.com for their corporate website. Yes, it’s a 8-digit number. Isn’t it too long to be easy to remember? I think so. But, it turns out that the name is also the phone number customers can call to book a car. I guess the company still thinks their customers mostly use the phone number as the point of first contact, even though the company also offers apps you can use to book without any phone call.
I can see the logic in using 10101111.com as their website, but I think they should forget about the phone number and just go for a short and easy to remember name, such as SZZC.com.
I think Kassey that they should go for an IDN. As you can see its not just about money or hype but about practicality and use.
However, I assume they never heard of an IDN and therefore didnt even look into that.
Yes, a Chinese IDN.IDN would be easy for consumers to remember, but it may take a while to educate the consumers. I see IDN.IDN’s role as a label to redirect consumers to the company’s corporate site which in most cases should be a .com with a name suitable for the global audience. The Internet is global in nature after all.