Importance of owning both .com and .co.uk

PM

how important is it to own both a .com and .co.uk if you are setting up a business. I have been searching for a domain/business name but they all seem to be registered and there are only a few.co.uk avalible.
Ive searched everything which includes nature of my business

(biznature)CENTRE.com, (biznature)SHOP.com, WORLD, CITY, CAPITAL, ONLINE,

If anyones good at names please PM me :$

thanks

magyar

Well, it's up to you. Ideally you'd have both .com and .co.uk as they're the ones people guess at most. Then again if you're unknown then you can target your marketing so that you make it more clear.

I would also consider a few mis-spellings if you can afford it; our company name has a hyphen in it, so we do .com and .co.uk for versions with and without the hyphen. It's also important to consider emails as well as web-browsing if your company is going to grow - emails are far more likely to be mistyped.

PM

Well it’s going to be a printing site. We print all kinds of stuff mainly clothing for both businesses and private customers. But I am also going to sell printed t-shirts, mainly music from Beatles to heavy metal. I’m also going to sell array of other kinds of T-shirts which include animated heroes.
I want to expand into Leather accessories (stud belts, etc), bags, etc in 12 months.

I’ve searched everything with printing and print in it. I would really appreciate any help at all. Thanks once again.

Astaroth

If you are looking at international trade then .com is a lot more obvious, if you are uniquely going to be in the UK then it is slightly less of an issue.

A concern of registering a domain with an existing .com is they may consider you to be in breach of their trademarks/ copyrights or that you are passing off as them. The closer your operations are going to be to the .com the more likely you will run into problems.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to "recover" domains from people who have registered the miss spellings of our brand names, some we buy at cost others we have made appeals and been awarded them with no payment going to the previous owners.

ukbill69

If you have both .com and .co.uk then no-one else can start up a business name the same as yours. I personally get .com .net and .co.uk and dont worry about others unless its a very good name and there all availible.

the_optimist

This might seem a stupid question to you, but I have a ...co.uk website. If I get the ...com name too, what do I do with it? Do I produce another website or do I use the same text or what?

magyar

the_optimist wrote:

This might seem a stupid question to you, but I have a ...co.uk website. If I get the ...com name too, what do I do with it? Do I produce another website or do I use the same text or what?

Your ISP should be able to point both domain names to the same web space.

Astaroth

the_optimist wrote:

This might seem a stupid question to you, but I have a ...co.uk website. If I get the ...com name too, what do I do with it? Do I produce another website or do I use the same text or what?

Most commonly you either point it at the same place or just setup an autoforward on it... there are benefits and risks of both practices (SEO)

If you want to setup an international and a UK version of your website you could use the 2 domains seperately.

Torby

ukbill69 wrote:

If you have both .com and .co.uk then no-one else can start up a business name the same as yours. I personally get .com .net and .co.uk and dont worry about others unless its a very good name and there all availible.

I think that just owning an internet name, either com or co.uk does not give you any rights to a business name....just be careful and make sure you register the web name first though....its a bit of a mess if you name your business first...then discover someone else has gone and bought the url....seen it happen....thats why there are so many "parked" domain names....people are speculating hoping the one they have bought for a few pounds may be valuable to an existing or new business.

marty1888

Have you tried the newer .eu domain?

melipona

Torby wrote:

I think that just owning an internet name, either com or co.uk does not give you any rights to a business name....just be careful and make sure you register the web name first though....its a bit of a mess if you name your business first...then discover someone else has gone and bought the url....seen it happen....thats why there are so many "parked" domain names....people are speculating hoping the one they have bought for a few pounds may be valuable to an existing or new business.

Too true, When I set up my ltd co a few years ago I didn't bother with a web presence at first, got round to it a few months later only to find somebody had registered the .co.uk domain but was not using it. I did however manage to register the .com and also .ltd.uk.