GoDaddy.com
GoDaddy has been quite aggressive with its renewal reminders, and email notices continue when one turns autorenew off.
But are such notices predatory? One user seems to think so.
In a Reddit post titled “GoDaddy’s transactional emails are downright predatory,” the GoDaddy customer explains:
“I manage a set of about a dozen domain names for one particular business in my GoDaddy account. The domains are due for renewal in about a week. After several years, the business decided last month that it didn’t need to keep all the extraneous .net, .org, and .biz domains, so I recently went in and disabled auto-renew for all but three primary domains.
Today I received an email from GoDaddy, entitled Renew your expiring domains today. The email listed three domains, and two of them were the business’ primary domains!
I logged in to GoDaddy and double-checked the renewal settings, which were correct. So I re-read the email in full and noticed a line that said “some of your domains are set to manual renewal, others to auto.” “
The problem, according to this GoDaddy customer, is that he feels harassed by the emails, for a setting that should not trigger notifications.
He further explains why:
“My client, who is listed as a contact, also received a similar email from GoDaddy, entitled Domain Expiration Notice. So now I have a concerned client calling me, thinking his primary domains are about to be cancelled.
So, why does GoDaddy take up two of the three spots in the list for domains that aren’t even set to expire? Because they’re scumbags, that’s why. They’re banking on people not reading carefully and just clicking “okay” buttons until the warnings stop.”
While we understand his frustration, having to explain to a customer whose domain he manages at GoDaddy what is going on, we don’t consider GoDaddy’s approach to be “predatory” – after all, they want to ensure you didn’t turn off your autorenew by accident, which might result in the loss of valuable domains.
Read the full post at Reddit.
I noticed that as well. I turned it off for a small batch of geo+service domains I was dropping last month and received at least 4 email reminders. the last reminder was yesterday letting me know they were finally deleted. I’m not sure it’s predatory though. More of a retention tactic for existing customers. Is it excessive? Maybe… :p
I think it’s ok to be reminded, no worse than the Seo Spam I am getting lately