As a reseller, we encounter a variety of challenges to the health of our business every day. Spam, stretched resources, razor thin profit margins, hackers, phishers, and, of course, competitors all pose challenges to our business.So how’s resellers catch their customer?

In some ways, our own parent registrar also competes with us, although not purposefully so. This quiet competition is frequently a function of the structure of the registrar’s relationship.

In fact, the very design of the reseller registrar relationship leads our registrar to communicate with our end-users. There are steps we can take, though, to tend to our customer base.

There’s no need for paranoia among resellers that their registrars are trying to steal from them. In fact, no data exists to suggest that registrars taking business from their resellers is a big problem.

Registrars who sell domains wholesale and retail are inherently in competition with their resellers. We’re both in the business of selling and managing domains.

Most of the retail registrars are no longer simple domain companies. Domains have become the hook for selling hosting, email and other more lucrative services. These service offerings used to be more the province of resellers.

Our registrar likely enjoys several major advantages over us. In general, it has a larger marketing budget, stronger brand awareness, more overall resources, and can offer domains more cheaply than us.

Our registrar also has two other huge advantages: our customers often turn to them directly for support, and our registrar routinely contacts our end-users to send domain renewal notices and other legitimate information. This often prompts the end-user to contact the registrar for one reason or another.