Choosing a Domain Name for Chinese Websites

In the Chinese market in particular, a good domain name is extremely important for any future marketing of your business.

Creating a website and buying a domain name are the prerequisites for any business making the move to online, and the choice of domain name will, more likely than not, have an impact on a business’s brand name.

In the Chinese market in particular, a good domain name is extremely important for any future marketing of a business.

Let’s examine some of the domain names that local Chinese websites have chosen. They can be split into the different categories below:

  • E-commerce
  • Search Engines
  • Portals
  • Classifieds
  • Review Sites

E-Commerce Websites

  • taobao.com
  • jd.com
  • yhd.com
  • dangdang.com
  • qunar.com
  • ctrip.com, ctrip.cn and xiecheng.com
  • amazon.cn

Taobao.com is China’s largest e-commerce website and is a literal translation of “Find Good Things.”

JD.com is the second largest e-commerce site in China and is the abbreviation of “Jing Dong” meaning “brand.” Years ago when the business first started, Jing Dong actually used the domain name 360buy.com. Brand consistency would become an ongoing issue, and the site’s domain name was subsequently switched from 360buy.com to jd.com.

yhd.com, China’s largest online supermarket, is the abbreviation of Yi Hao Dian – the literal translation being “number one shop.”

Dangdang.com is another large e-commerce site in China, which began as an online bookstore. Today Dang Dang has, over time, grown into selling a wide range of other products beyond books.

qunar.com, China’s largest travel product price comparison site, is not a Chinese word, and has retained its unique domain name.

Ctrip.com, the largest online travel booking website in China, doesn’t correlate with specific Chinese words. The C stands for the English word for China or Chinese, and trip is a word that highly relates to travel.

One important pattern emerging from the above group, is that all of them are big, and very well-known brand names in China, and they have all chosen to stick with the .com domain extension, as opposed to the region specific .cn extension for their businesses.

Ctrip does, however, also own the domain name xiecheng.com – From Ctrip’s Chinese name, Xie Cheng – which when entered directly into a browser, is redirected to ctrip.cn.

Amazon.cn, a Chinese subsidiary of Amazon, uses the same brand name as the U.S. site for the Chinese market. As Amazon.com is used by the U.S.-based business, the Chinese subsidiary has chosen to use domain extension .cn. When z.cn is entered into a Web browser, users are redirected to amazon.cn, allowing Chinese users an easy way to directly type the domain name into their Web browsers.

Search Engines

  • baidu.com
  • haosou.com
  • sogou.com
  • youdao.com
  • google.cn and g.cn

All four Chinese local search engines baidu.com, haosou.com, sogou.com, and youdao.com use a .com domain extension. Bai Du, Hao Sou and You Dao are the respective businesses brand names. Only Sou Gou is using sogou.com, which has a slight difference in the spelling between its domain name and brand name.

Google uses google.cn. If you enter g.cn directly you will be redirected to google.cn. Again, g.cn makes it easy for Chinese users to directly type the domain name into their web browsers.

Portals

  • sohu.com
  • sina.com.cn
  • qq.com and tencent.com
  • dangdang.com

The early Chinese portal websites are sohu.com, sina.com.cn, and qq.com. Except for Sina, the others are both using .com domain extension. Sou Hu is the actual brand of sohu.com. Xin Lan is the actual brand name for sina.com.cn. QQ is China’s most popular instant messaging tool, a subsidiary of tencent.com, which itself has a different brand name in Chinese – Teng Xun.

Classifieds

  • hao123.com
  • 2345.com

Many Chinese yellow pages sites use “numbers” in their domain names. hao123.com and 2345.com are Chinese yellow pages websites. Hao123 in the early years used to be called Wang Zhi Zhi Jia which means a collection of Web addresses, but in later years Chinese users mostly refer to it directly as hao123.

Review Sites 

  • dianping.com
  • douban.com

China’s most popular user review sites dianping.com and douban.com are both using .com domain extension which correlate directly to their respective Chinese brand names.

Having a domain name to match the Chinese brand name of the business, or ensuring easy shortcuts for Anglicized brand names being accessed by Chinese users, should be key considerations for a China digital strategy.

Image via Shutterstock.

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