In the days before they were taken over by Donuts, Rightside published a blog post on how one of America’s biggest brands, Amazon, is using domain names. Following their takeover of Whole Foods, the American organic supermarket chain, Amazon bought up several grocery-related domains in a number of legacy and new gTLDs.
Like many other big brands, Amazon vigorously protects their trademarks in new gTLDs. They have registered hundreds of domains in new gTLDs operated by Donuts alone, with second-level domains including “Amazon,” “Prime,” “Echo,” “Alexa,” and dozens of others. These domains appear in broad, business-relevant domain extensions like .sale, .video, and .gives, as well as more product-specific verticals like .family, .software, and with the purchase of Whole Foods, .market.
In their post, Donuts notes that what sets Amazon apart from many brands is that they are also very aggressive in putting their vast domain portfolio to active use, often redirecting their new domains to appropriate product pages, landing pages, and other web properties. This complementary domain strategy can make it easier to use dense websites with many pages and complicated navigation trees, a description which certainly fits Amazon’s flagship web property.
Examples given of how Amazon uses its domains are Amazon.dentist which takes you to the dental supplies category landing page, while Amazon.news is the download page for news and magazine apps in Amazon’s mobile ecosystem. Non-consumer-focused domains also find a use, with Amazon.pub redirecting to the division that works directly with authors, or Amazon.lawyer, which is a job listing for Amazon’s legal department. Amazon.reviews even goes to a collection of some of the funniest customer reviews their products have earned.