But you know, it happens to everybody, sooner than later. Rarely anything good lasts too long. This is what has been happening the past few years in the domain industry… Big time. The bigger players, such as registrars and veteran domainers with money up the ass have been squeezing the little guys right out.

Crying or bitching really won’t do much. You just have to suck it up and re-strategize. There are many ways to go about earning a buck in this wonderful biz we call domaining. You just can’t get attached to any one method too much. You have to be well prepared and ready for the unexpected because that’s how this biz is. Lifecycle of any one opportunity is very short.

So I have a good friend who I helped start his very own e-commerce store about 4 – 5 years ago. He did great in 2005… 2006 he did even better. 2007 and 2008 he continued to grow his entire operation by 300 – 500% easily, year over year, with record sales. Now 2009 is when he started running into problems… He started getting squeezed!

The whole idea behind going online with his retail operation was due to the fact that his offline store was seeing less and less activity as more people were shopping online, because there were better deals. I suggested to go exclusively online with e-commerce and soon after they did just that. It just made more sense and was better for the bottom line.

Well, they had a great run for a couple of years and then they started seeing more competition from smaller players who turned into big players, because that’s what always happens with time. People flock to where there is good or easy money. Then soon it didn’t make sense anymore to mess around with eBay, one of their best sales outlets so they said bye bye to it.

Now earlier this year, Amazon, the place where they sell close to two third’s of their stuff and do the most of their biz online started directly competing with them… Looks like Amazon saw an opportunity (analyzed all the sales data from last few years, looked into margins and added the inventory by going direct to manufacturer since there is some nice $$$ to be made) and that’s that.

Looks like by this time next year they will be all out of biz… Just hard to compete with all these big boys, and these guys just squeeze you right out. Unfortunately it happens to everybody, sooner than later. Once my friend was one of the top guys in their niche, but in a few month’s time ever… It may all be over.

Now back to domains… Registrars are nowadays squeezing out the small guys, more and more. They are keeping tons of the best expired domains inventory, and whatever good domains do make it to the auction stage, the well established and professional domainers who have been around for 5 – 10 years or more are overpaying because they can do just that.

Register.com for example keeps tons of domains, and then they try to liquidate it by running special auctions via SnapNames and NameJet. A domain which cost them to acquire $7 per year they easily flip for hundreds or thousands. Nice ROI there… Aaah!

It’s not easy to make it in the e-commerce biz or any online biz as a matter of fact in 2010 and moving forward… Unless you find yourself a small niche which you can dominate eventually, and the sooner the better. Same goes for domains. You gotta have a specialty and go after a very certain type of domains. Being all over the place is not a very good or winnable strategy for those who are beginners.

You spread yourself out too much and you will lose focus and just end up in a big mess. You gotta have a specialty when doing “domain investment” and know exactly what it is you are getting yourself into.