Is a country specific TLD to limiting?
We have just launched our helpdesk and have started to wonder if out .uk & .co.uk TLD are too limiting.
If you are outside the country of TLD would this put you off interest in the product (also the prices are in GBP rather than USD)?
I appreciate any thoughts and input.
Thanks in advance.
Chris
If the service you offer is a good one, people will not care too much about the TLD. These days, most people rarely even look at them.
Of more concern is the fact that you only offer pricing in GBP. That really does put people off.
Use a service like ipapi.co (there are many others) to get country information from your visitors and offer different prices according to which country they visit you from.
These services typically offer a free tier layer and then charge a modest amount per month depending on the number of requests they receive from you.
The data they collect from your visitor can be returned to you in a variety of formats such as CSV or JSON. It is then an easy matter to obtain the country name and match it against an array of country names for supported currencies.
It is easy enough to get base exchange rates and set your currency pricing accordingly. Most payment processors will accept payments in different currencies and will convert to sterling for you. Strip and PayPal both do.
You dont need to offer all currencies but you should offer GBP, USD and Euro (unless you don't want EU customers because of VAT considerations) as a minimum and perhaps a few others.
Anyone who comes to you from outside the countries of the currencies you accept should then be offered a default option of USD purely because that is what they would expect to see.
I used to live in the UK (now in US), and even I would be a little hesitant about buying from a .co.uk. Best to get an international domain if you're going for international traffic
Co.uk and .UK signals that you are focusing on the UK market, at least to me. Even .co or .io would be better for truly global companies.
As for pricing, I would expect EUR or USD. GBP is too regional. Obviously SEK would be the best because I'm from Sweden.
Yes for .co.uk, but not if the TLD forms part of your name. For instance my side product mydevportfol.io is for helping developers build portfolios, so the .io domain name makes sense, no reasonable person would consider the product to be specific to the indian ocean...
In your case though it might give me pause for thought. Why is this domain specific to a certain country? Do they only cater to that geographical location? Do they offer worldwide support? Are they only in a specific timezone and working with them is gonna be tricky?
In the end, if your product offering is solving a pain point that hurts enough, I'd probably just go with it, but as I said it would give me pause.
As an aside, I'm working on a simple app to find available domain names, check it out, might give you some ideas. domaingenerator.chrisdermody.com