This company recently upgraded its domain name — but from one difficult name to another one, in my opinion.
易 房网 (Yi Fang Wang) is an online real estate service operated by a Qingdao-based company founded in 2009. (BTW, Qingdao city is well known for its beer.)
The name means “a website making it easy to find houses,” which is a suitable name to help users find commercial or residential properties in the Qingdao area.
The service was available on eFang.tv, but this domain name is probably a bad choice because:
– eFang is not an exact match of the service name. ‘e’ rhymes with Yi and therefore is used instead of Yi in this case. Also, “wang’ is missing from the domain name.
– .tv is not a mainstream extension in corporate China and .tv is not appropriate in this case because the service contents do not seem to have any video component.
So, the company decided to upgrade the domain name and recently switched to YiFang5.com. eFang.tv now redirects to YiFang5.com.
While the YiFang part is good, the “5” part posts a new challenge. I can understand that the company thinks 5 is good because it rhymes with “wang”.
The difficulty is, when consumers hear the service name, they are more likely to go to YiFangWang.com than YiFang5.com. Traffic leakage is the problem.
So I thought: what would I choose if I were the CEO of this company?
If money is not an issue, my first choice would be YFW.com. The name is simple and .com gives you instant credibility in China. YFW is an exact match acronym for Yi Fang Wang. The Whois record of YFW.com indicates it’s available for purchase.
If YFW.com is too expensive, my next choice would be YFW.cn. It’s not golden but still gives me a solid ground to build my business if I don’t intend to go global. Luckily, YFW.cn is available for sale on 4.cn.
Although YiFangWang.com is 3-pin, its length is acceptable and therefore a decent choice. The domain name was registered in 2011 but currently not used, so it may be available for purchase. The Whois records has the contact details.
YiFangWang.cn has a BIN price of $632.5 USD on Yumi.com domain trading platform. At this price, it is certainly affordable.
These four choices are good in my opinion. How about you? What other domain names would you suggest?
I would go with either of the 2 options in .com.
By the way, this company’s act is like “falling from sky but stuck in a palm tree”. We use this proverb in our native language to describe similar situation 😀
“falling from sky but stuck in a palm tree” What does it mean exactly, if you don’t mind?
We usually say this to a person who is stuck a situation which is similar to another new situation he got stuck in.
So like first he was hanging in the sky and now stuck in palm tree but didn’t come on ground to be in normal position 😀
Got it. Thanks