Reseller
A company that sells domains under a larger registrar's accreditation rather than holding its own.
- glossary
A reseller is a company or individual that sells domain registrations to end customers without holding its own ICANN accreditation — instead, it operates under the umbrella of a licensed registrar and routes orders through that registrar's systems. Resellers are ubiquitous in the domain industry: hosting providers, website builders, and niche registrars frequently work this way, offering branded storefronts backed by a large accredited registrar such as GoDaddy, Tucows, or Enom. The arrangement lets the reseller reach customers without the expense and compliance burden of ICANN accreditation, while the underlying registrar maintains the contractual relationship with the registry and manages the technical pipeline. From a buyer's perspective, the experience looks identical, but knowing whether you are dealing with a reseller or a direct registrar matters when assessing support escalation paths or migration options.
Related keywords
- reseller
- domain reseller
- white-label registrar
- ICANN accreditation
- registrar
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.