Preview data. Pricing is verified from the registrar's own source for 6 of 20 registrars (fetched live where the registrar publishes one); the remaining registrars' prices, plus all scoring and country recommendations, are illustrative placeholders pending verified testing. See data sources for a row-by-row breakdown, the methodology, or fetch /data/verification-status.json for a machine-readable view.
For a store the best registrar is Porkbun — .com renews flat at $11.08, .shop at $31.41, and DNS includes ALIAS records, which matters when the storefront sits behind a platform that wants a CNAME at the apex. Spaceship is cheapest on both (.com $10.18, .shop $31.25). But the decision that costs the most money is the extension, not the registrar: .shop and .store renew at roughly three times a .com ($31.25 and $32.88 against $10.18 at the cheapest verified seller), and not one of the five sellers we verify prices either of them flat. Namecheap advertises .shop at $0.98 and renews it at $48.98 — fifty times the first year. If the storefront is the business, the .com is the cheaper asset to hold.
Picks follow our published scoring methodology. Last updated 2026-08-19.
Why: Flat .com pricing at $11.08 — the first year is the renewal — plus ALIAS records for pointing an apex domain at a hosted storefront, free WHOIS privacy, and the highest overall score of the six registrars we verify.
Watch out: Support is email and business-hours chat, so a problem at 2am waits until morning. Its .shop renews at $31.41 against a $2.06 first year, like every other seller of that extension.
Why: The cheapest verified renewals on all three extensions a store cares about: .com $10.18, .shop $31.25, .store $32.88, all in.
Watch out: We hold verified prices for only 19 extensions here, and it itemises the ICANN fee separately — compare the all-in figure. Its .store first year of $1.18 renews at 28× that.
Why: The only registrar of the six advertising 24/7 live chat, and the highest support score (9.0) — the right trade when a DNS problem is costing sales while you wait for a reply.
Watch out: The most expensive store TLDs we verify by a wide margin: .shop renews at $48.98 and .store at $43.98, against $31.25 and $32.88 at Spaceship. Its $0.98 first-year offers on both are the steepest cliffs on this site.
| Registrar | Overall | Key score for this pick | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Porkbun | 9.0 | 9.0 overall | Flat .com pricing at $11.08 — the first year is the renewal — plus ALIAS records for pointing an apex domain at a hosted storefront, free WHOIS privacy, and the highest overall score of the six registrars we verify. |
| Spaceship | 8.4 | 8.5 renewal pricing | The cheapest verified renewals on all three extensions a store cares about: .com $10.18, .shop $31.25, .store $32.88, all in. |
| Namecheap | 8.6 | 9.0 support | The only registrar of the six advertising 24/7 live chat, and the highest support score (9.0) — the right trade when a DNS problem is costing sales while you wait for a reply. |
Scores are on a 0–10 scale. See how we score for the weights and evidence behind each figure.
Across every verified row on this site, the deepest first-year discounts are on .shop and .store, and there is no flat option: all five sellers we verify discount both. The multiples are not marginal — Namecheap renews .shop at 50× its $0.98 first year and .store at 45× its $0.98, Spaceship renews .store at 28× its $1.18. A launch budget built on the checkout total will be wrong by an order of magnitude in year two.
The cheapest verified .com renewal is $10.18 a year against $31.25 for .shop and $32.88 for .store — roughly a third the cost, every year, for the extension shoppers still type by default. The store TLDs can be worth it for an exact-match name, but they are a recurring premium and should be chosen knowing the number rather than the promotion.
Most hosted storefronts want the apex domain pointed at a hostname rather than an IP, which plain DNS cannot do with a CNAME. Registrars solve it with ALIAS or ANAME records: Porkbun documents ALIAS support explicitly, and the others in this list document standard records with DNSSEC. Check the record types against what your platform's setup guide asks for before you buy.
A domain problem during trading hours is lost revenue, so the support channel matters more here than it does for a hobby site. Namecheap scores highest of the six on support (9.0) and is the only one advertising 24/7 live chat; Porkbun and Spaceship are business-hours channels; NameSilo is ticket-only and scores 6.5. Our incident log carries dated outages for two registrars — read it before treating any of them as infallible.
An expiring storefront domain is an outage with a bill attached, and it is the failure most worth automating a check for. Note that the registrars here issue single all-or-nothing API keys rather than scoped tokens, so a script permitted to renew is also permitted to transfer the domain away and to rewrite the DNS the store resolves through — read the per-registrar API access facts before issuing one to an automation.