.shoes Domain
Step Into Dedicated Footwear Branding
Register your .shoes domain from just £56.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .shoes domain?
The .shoes domain gives footwear brands, shoe retailers, and cobbler services a domain that identifies their product category instantly. The footwear market is competitive, and .shoes helps specialist retailers stand apart from general fashion sites. It works for everything from trainers and high heels to bespoke handmade shoes.
Who should register .shoes?
Shoe retailers, footwear brands, cobblers, and specialist shoe shops.
Why choose .shoes?
- Instant product identification
- Helps specialists stand out
- Works for all footwear categories
- Clear and memorable branding
Who runs .shoes, and since when
Registry data from the .shoes delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- Binky Moon, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2013
- Delegated 12 December 2013
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no retail licence or brand ownership required
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £56.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
What .shoes costs a footwear retailer over ten years
Start with the bill, because it decides this one. A .shoes domain is among the dearer extensions in our range, running close to six times the annual cost of a .co.uk. Over ten years of trading that gap is real money for a small footwear retailer, and the domain buys no hosting, no traffic and no ranking on its own. If the name is right, it is worth paying. If you are buying it because it looks tidy, it is not.
The second thing is the plural. There is no .shoe in the root zone, only .shoes, so every name in this extension ends in a plural noun. That suits a retailer, where walking.shoes or cheap.shoes reads exactly as intended, and fights a single brand, where a maker called Marsh ends up at marsh.shoes and sounds like a category rather than a name. Say your candidate out loud before you order. The good ones sound like a shelf label; the bad ones sound like a search result.
Behind it is one of the Binky Moon strings under Identity Digital, in the root zone since 12 December 2013 and delegated in the first wave of the 2012 application round. Registration is open to anybody, with no check that you sell footwear and nothing stopping a competitor taking the plural of your brand. If the name matters, register it before you talk about it, not after.
Our steer: a second address for a shop that already has its .co.uk, or a first address for a brand whose name really does end in a plural.
Is .shoes the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.shoes works well if
- Your name reads naturally as a phrase ending in shoes, so the extension finishes the sentence instead of interrupting it.
- Footwear is the whole business rather than one aisle of it, and you want the address to say so before anybody clicks.
- You sell internationally and the .com of your brand has been gone since the 1990s.
- You want a memorable address for one collection or one campaign, sitting alongside the main shop on another extension.
Look elsewhere if
- You sell clothing and accessories too. The address boxes you into a category your stock has already outgrown.
- Cost matters. This runs close to six times a .co.uk every year, and the renewal invoice arrives whether the shop had a good year or not.
- Your brand name is singular. There is no .shoe, so the plural gets bolted on and the whole name reads oddly.
Stocking more than footwear? A .shop leaves you room to widen the range without changing address. See .shop pricing.
.shoes vs .com: which should you register?
Nobody types .shoes by accident, and nobody fails to type .com. That asymmetry is the starting point. A .com address is the one a customer guesses when they half remember your name, which is worth a great deal for a shop that gets talked about offline. A .shoes address is never guessed, so every visit has to come from a link, an ad, a search result or something printed.
What .shoes offers back is a name you can still get. Two-word .com combinations in footwear have been gone for twenty years, so the realistic .com choice is usually longer, hyphenated or invented. Against that, a clean two-word phrase ending in .shoes reads well and fits on a swing tag.
On price the gap is wide and permanent: a .com is one of the cheaper extensions we sell and a .shoes is one of the dearer ones, every year, for as long as you trade. For most UK footwear retailers we would put the .co.uk first, the .com second if the name is free, and the .shoes third as branding rather than infrastructure.
| .shoes | .com | |
|---|---|---|
| Typed by default | Never | Almost always |
| In the root zone since | 2013 | 1985 |
| Registry | Binky Moon, LLC (Identity Digital) | VeriSign |
| Annual cost | One of the dearer extensions | One of the cheapest |
| Names still available | Plenty of clean two-word phrases | Very few in footwear |
.shoes domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .shoes domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyYes. Identity Digital applies no eligibility rules to .shoes, so there is no trading check, no company requirement and nothing to prove. The extension is open worldwide on a first-come, first-served basis. The only limits are the usual ones for a new generic extension: names on the ICANN reserved schedule, names the registry has kept back or priced as premium, and names blocked by a trademark holder through DPML.
No. The current IANA root zone list contains .shoes and no singular equivalent, so every name in this extension ends in a plural. That is worth testing against your brand before you buy. Phrases work well, because running.shoes or handmade.shoes read as intended. Single brand names work less well, because the plural attaches itself to your name and turns it into a description. Reading the candidate out loud is the quickest way to tell which you have.
The registry sets the wholesale price and Identity Digital prices category words above generic ones. Nothing technical justifies it: the DNS records, the DNSSEC support and the resolution speed are identical to any other extension, so you are paying for the word rather than the plumbing. Look at the figure on this page, multiply it by the number of years you expect to trade, and compare that with the same sum for a .co.uk before you commit. The difference is often larger than people expect.
No. Google treats keywords in the extension as neutral, giving neither an advantage nor a penalty, so a .shoes address will not lift you above a .co.uk selling the same stock. Where the extension does help is on the click: a shopper scanning results sees the category confirmed before they arrive. Treat that as a conversion benefit rather than a ranking one, and put your ranking effort into product pages, stock schema and page speed.
Included with Your .shoes Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
Other Lifestyle Domains Extensions
Register your .shoes domain today
Secure your .shoes domain from just £56.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
