Registrar is the largest product family still outside the billing platform. Three bespoke checkout surfaces — purchase, renewal, transfer — each with its own payment flow, no 3DS enforcement, no platform retry, no Unified Checkout.

Purchases

342K attempts/month. 87K completions. 25% conversion (misleading — denominator inflated by window shoppers). No 3DS. Domains are high-value fraud targets.

Renewals

Automatic renewal via existing payment method. No platform retry on failure. No Unified Checkout fallback.

Transfers

Domain transfer requires payment. Bespoke flow. No platform payment method handling.

All three flows through Unified Checkout. 3DS enforced on purchases (where fraud risk is highest). Renewals and transfers get UC as a side effect.

The highest-volume registrar flow. Five steps, each with a clear gate before proceeding.

Step 1
Instrument
Step 2
Baseline
Step 3
Build
Step 4
Ramp
Step 5
Delete

Registrar seeds the Billing Lifecycle domain. Domain purchases are single invoices — not recurring subscriptions. By proving the invoice model works beyond stripe.Subscription, registrar establishes that the platform can bill for anything, not just subscriptions.

Seeds Billing Lifecycle

Proves invoicing beyond subscriptions. Single invoices for domain purchases. The billing lifecycle domain needs to handle more than recurring subscriptions.

Fraud Protection

Domains are immediately useful (hosting, email, resale), hard to claw back once registered, and currently purchasable without any authentication gate.

Platform Consolidation

Three bespoke flows → one platform. Less code to maintain. One payment path to secure. One checkout surface to improve.

Availability Re-check

Domain could be taken between search and payment. At payment confirmation, re-check availability before issuing to the registry.

Fraud rate unknown

High impact. The business case for 3DS depends on the current fraud rate. Baseline step must quantify.

3DS drops conversion

High impact. Percentage ramp with hold periods. If legitimate conversion drops below threshold, pause.

Volume at scale

342K attempts/month — highest volume registrar flow. Extended ramp schedule with 1-week holds.

Availability race

Medium impact. Domain taken between search and payment. Re-check at confirmation. Minimize window.