"Trump" domain. Waste of money or ...?

I was always curious if it makes sense to invest in sonorous domain names when launching a new project. And the other day I got this story.

Just over a year ago, acquaintances who owned an online mattress store had an idea to buy the domain matras.ru . For several years, the domain itself was put up on the largest global trading platform for the domains sedo.co.uk , but even large industry manufacturers did not buy it. It is clear that the product is very expensive and is unlikely to be sold in the future.

But the guys really believed in their business and assumed to firmly occupy their niche for many years. In the end, the entire company with the domain can be sold as a ready-made business.

The online store itself at that time was already. The catalog on the site is really big and by the number of positions (several thousand) and by product type - mattresses, beds and accessories.
Goods were delivered in 5 cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinburg. But the turnover and market share were not as desired.
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Weighed all the pluses and minuses. There are more advantages for the long-term perspective:

• There is only one such domain and, having bought it today, you can be sure that in the future it will not have a strong competitor.
  
• Potential recognition and ease of brand memorization
  
• An additional argument in negotiations with suppliers of products.
  
• Higher rankings in search engines for queries in which the word "mattress" is present
  
• Strong argument for potential selling business
  
• Higher customer confidence in the store.

Therefore, it was decided: to buy. The purchase itself was like a detective. Negotiations have been going on for almost a year. The domain owner preferred to communicate only by mail and answered once a week, periodically completely disappearing, and the euro exchange rate was constantly changing.
In the end, when buying, my friends never found out who owned the domain (the person used a pseudonym) and in which country he was located. They never spoke on the phone.

As a result, the domain was purchased for 100,000 euros. The deal was made through Frankfurt. Sedo Commission was 3%. For comparison, the RU-center in such cases takes 10% + 18% VAT.

Little about the results

• Domain trust really works. Negotiations with suppliers are now easier, and since the purchase of a domain, the number of products has increased almost tenfold. Conversion of visitors to customers increased from 0.7 to 1.5%, which is very worthy for furniture.
  
• SEO companies were not involved in website promotion, but today site traffic is more than 60,000 new visitors per month, not counting regular customers. By the way, over the past time, the number of regular customers has almost doubled.
  
• In these 5 cities, they collect approximately 30% of all traffic along the mattress niche in search engines (the volume of the audience and search statistics were analyzed), and this share is constantly growing.
  
• A noticeable part of the search traffic accounts for requests, in which in one form or another there is a site name (“mattress.ru”, “mattress ru”, “matras.ru”, etc.), and the statistics of queries in Yandex and Google is growing every month. These requests are the highest in terms of conversion, the average bill for them is about 12,000 rubles, for the rest - about 9,500.
  
• The only major drawback was the loss of traffic in the first 3 months of work. But then Yandex stuck sites, and attendance went up the hill.

Naturally, the deal has not paid off. It took a little over a year. But for those who want to firmly occupy their niche and plans to remain on the market for a long time, or want to sell a ready-made business, you should look to this branding option.