The .shop extension continues to be of significant interest to cybersquatters. Brands active in online commerce are particularly targeted. As a preventive measure, it is good precaution to register the .shop domain name corresponding to the brand name.
Variants containing generic terms related to e-commerce are also relevant.
For example, for “abc” brand, the variations abcshop.shop, abc-shop.shop, abcoutlet.shop, abcoutlet.shop, abcsale.shop and abc-sale.shop are among the domain names registered by the cybersquatters.
Available since 2016, the .shop extension is aimed at companies offering online sales platforms for products and services marketed under their brands. It meets with great success, with a total of more than 2.5 million domain name registrations. It is the fourth most popular extension among new gTLDs (generic top-level domain names).
Online brand protection helps reducing the risk of damaging attacks on the company and the brand.
Of course, the purpose is not to register all variants but instead to secure the critical ones, especially the mark itself, without affixes or suffixes, as well as the hyphenated version(s) for marks made up of several terms.
Variants are countless, from common misspellings to character swaps and homoglyphs. These variants could get fraudulently registered yet. That’s why defensive registrations are to be regarded as part of an overall abuse-prevention strategy. It is also useful to put domain blocking domain tools in place and, in parallel, to monitor newly registered domains so as to quickly identify malicious activities and react as is most appropriate, by means of e.g. take down requests for fraudulent content and ADR proceedings against an illegitimate domain name registration.
Open the door to a wider customer base, yes, but close it to counterfeiters and cybersquatters – a challenge that IP Twins can assist you meet.
