.store domain names

What .store is

.store is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) from ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round: open, unrestricted, and positioned as an e-commerce keyword extension in direct competition with .shop. IANA lists it as a standard generic TLD, with no sponsorship and no community charter.

The registry operator is Radix Technologies Inc., operating through CO Services Cayman Limited. Two operator transfers appear in the IANA record and both are easy to misread: the chain runs DotStore Inc. to Radix FZC in 2021, then to Radix Technologies Inc. in 2024. Those were corporate restructurings inside the Radix group, not sales. The extension has been Radix-owned throughout. IANA registered and delegated it on 11 February 2016, and general availability opened on 14 June 2016.

One change is recent and material. Back-end registry services moved from CentralNic to Tucows Registry with a transition day of 17 March 2026. Radix's own policy pages have not been updated and still name CentralNic, so a good deal of documentation about how this extension operates technically is now out of date, including at the registry's own site.

Who can register .store

.store is open to anyone, anywhere. There is no requirement to operate a store, no company registration to produce, no country nexus, and no identity or credential verification beyond the contact-data accuracy obligations ICANN places on every gTLD registrar.

Since there is no declaration to sign, there is no audit to fail and no extension-specific penalty for a false statement. The applicable mechanisms are general ones: suspension for materially inaccurate registration data, and loss of the name through the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy or the Uniform Rapid Suspension system where a trademark owner prevails. Radix reserves and prices a set of premium names, which restricts what you pay rather than who you are.

What .store costs to own

Live prices are shown elsewhere on this page; the structure is what should drive the decision. .store follows the standard Radix pattern of heavy promotional discounting in the first year at volume registrars, against a renewal rate at the upper end of the mid-market and materially above .com's. Within its own peer group, .store's renewal sits at the more expensive end.

The gap is wide enough that the first-year price is not usable for planning. A retailer weighing .shop against .store on advertised first-year prices is comparing figures that describe promotions rather than products. What matters is the renewal rate multiplied by the years you intend to hold the name, and beyond roughly two years, .store costs more than .com.

None of that makes the model dishonest. Registrars sell the first year below their own cost deliberately, treating the domain as a customer-acquisition instrument and taking their margin from the renewal and the hosting and email attached to it. That is a legitimate structure and, for a business that will keep the name for a decade, a reasonable one. It becomes a bad outcome only when the buyer never saw the second-year number. No renewal percentage is published for .store specifically, and none should be quoted; the new gTLD segment as a whole is estimated to renew at around 31%.

Premium names give the clearest answer in this group, and it is unambiguous. Radix's own published premiums report states that Radix premiums sold via EPP renew at the same price as the first-year registration fee. A premium .store name therefore carries its premium price every year, indefinitely, with no standard-renewal tier to fall back on. Restoration after expiry, through the Redemption Grace Period, costs substantially more than a renewal.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.store names are registered for one to ten years. That range is documented consistently across registrar sources, but no Radix registry document stating a general-availability maximum could be located, so treat it as corroborated rather than registry-confirmed.

Transfers use the standard gTLD mechanism: an EPP authorization code from the losing registrar, presented to the gaining registrar, with auto-approval after five days if the losing registrar does not act. There is no tag change and no registry-specific form.

Two things changed at the March 2026 migration, and most published guidance about .store transfers is now wrong. First, all authorization codes were reissued: Tucows Registry states that auth codes did not carry over from the previous provider, so any .store code stored before March 2026 will fail. Second, the registry-level transfer lock is gone. Under CentralNic, .store applied a registry-enforced 60-day lock after initial registration; Tucows states plainly that transfer lock is not enforced at the registry. The ICANN-level right for a registrar to deny a transfer within 60 days still applies, so you may still be blocked, but the block now originates at the registrar.

The 60-day lock following a change of registrant is unchanged, since it comes from ICANN policy rather than the registry, and a registrar-level opt-out remains available. The Redemption Grace Period, the window after deletion during which only the original registrant may recover the name for a restore fee, was 30 days before the migration; Tucows publishes no durations, so the current figure is presumed unchanged rather than verified.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, replaced WHOIS as the definitive source of gTLD registration data on 28 January 2025. For .store it is live at rdap.radix.host, an endpoint shared across the Radix portfolio and verified against IANA's RDAP bootstrap registry.

Redaction follows ICANN's Registration Data Policy, in force since 21 August 2025. Personal registrant fields are withheld where redaction is legally required or supported by a commercially reasonable purpose, and a contact email address or web form must be published so the registrant remains reachable. Radix's own WHOIS Access Policy is stale on both counts: it still points at a pre-migration hostname and does not mention RDAP at all.

Privacy and proxy services are permitted. Radix's policy set contains no privacy or proxy provision, and registrars record WHOIS privacy as supported for .store. That is an absence of prohibition rather than an explicit endorsement, but nothing at registry level stands in your way.

DNSSEC is supported and well corroborated, though Radix's practice statement pointer still directs to the superseded CentralNic document. Internationalized domain names are supported: Radix added nine scripts to .store in September 2016, covering Latin, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Lao, and Arabic, and registrars now record ten with the addition of Chinese.

Who .store suits, and who should avoid it

The concrete case for .store is a retail or direct-to-consumer business whose .com is unavailable, where yourbrand.store reads naturally, and where the buyer has looked at the renewal price and decided it is a rounding error against inventory, fulfillment, and advertising. For most e-commerce operations it genuinely is. It also suits a brand separating a storefront from a corporate site, and a bricks-and-mortar retailer moving online where the word carries its physical connotation. On abuse evidence it is the cleaner of the two keyword commerce extensions: .store does not appear in Interisle's Phishing Landscape 2025 top 20 by raw volume or by phishing rate per 10,000 registrations, a meaningful absence given that .xyz and .shop rank fourth and fifth by volume.

It suits you poorly if you are not a retailer, since the semantics pull against the name. It suits you poorly if you expect the domain to signal an established retailer to a cold audience, which it does not yet do. It suits you poorly if you are buying a premium name as a one-time purchase, because that price recurs every year. And it suits you poorly if you have not priced the renewal, which sits at the more expensive end of this group.

Common mistakes with .store

• Buying a premium .store without realizing the premium price recurs annually. Radix states in its own published report that premiums sold via EPP renew at the same price as the first-year registration fee. A name treated as a one-time acquisition is in fact a permanent annual commitment at that level, and this is the most expensive .store-specific error.
• Relying on an auth code stored before March 2026. Every .store authorization code was reissued during the migration to Tucows Registry. A transfer attempted with an old code will simply fail; request a fresh code at the moment you need it, and do not assume pre-2026 transfer-lock guidance still describes the registry's behavior.
• Treating .store and .shop as interchangeable and picking on the advertised first year. They differ on renewal cost, on abuse record, on registry operator, and on regional recognition. Compare renewals and reputation, not promotions.

Radix: the private company behind a slice of the namespace

Most registrants never learn who operates the extension they buy, and on .store the answer is more interesting than usual. Radix was founded in 2012 by the brothers Bhavin and Divyank Turakhia, is headquartered in Mumbai, and remains privately held under the Directi group. Its registry entity of record is Radix Technologies Inc., operating through CO Services Cayman Limited, which is why the corporate footprint reads as India and Cayman at once.

The portfolio is the point. Alongside .store, Radix operates .online and .site, plus .tech, .space, .website, .fun, .host, .press, and .pw. The March 2026 back-end migration moved eleven Radix extensions and roughly ten million domains in a single transition. That is a substantial share of the new gTLD market held by one privately owned company that answers to no public shareholders and publishes no financial statements.

Be precise about the IANA record. The two operator transfers it shows, DotStore Inc. to Radix FZC in 2021 and Radix FZC to Radix Technologies Inc. in 2024, are internal restructurings, not sales to a third party. Nobody bought .store from anyone, and descriptions that present those entries as changes of ownership are misreading the root database.

What the concentration means for a registrant is mostly practical. Policy is written once and applied across the portfolio, which is why the premium renewal rule that governs .store governs .online and .site identically, and why a single commercial decision moved eleven extensions to a new technical provider on one night. Radix is also unusually willing to publish, which cuts in the registrant's favor: its premiums report discloses premium renewal rates of 65.1% at first renewal, 74.7% at second, and 88.1% at third and subsequent, a datapoint almost no registry releases. Those figures cover premium names only and should never be read as .store's general renewal rate. What they do show is that names people paid real money for behave completely differently from names acquired on a promotion, which is the sharpest available explanation for why headline renewal rates across this class look the way they do.