Retailers have a word for merchandise that sits too long without selling. They call it dead stock.
We should probably borrow it.
In retail, dead stock is inventory that's been sitting unsold and isn't going to move at the price on the tag. The problem isn't the shelf space. It's the money tied up in products nobody's buying, plus whatever it costs to keep them sitting there.
Domains don't take up warehouse space. Nothing to shelve, nothing to box up, nothing to haul to the back.
But the carrying cost is real. Every year we pay the renewal, and that renewal is rent on inventory.
Think about a store with a thousand products, where seven hundred sell regularly and three hundred have been in the stockroom since 2021. A decent retailer doesn't shrug and say those will move eventually. They start asking why. Has demand shifted? Was the original buy just wrong? Would a markdown clear them out, or is it time to dump the whole lot to a liquidator and take the loss?
Those are our questions too. We just don't ask them very often.
Part of it is that domains are easy to ignore. A domain doesn't look old sitting in a registrar account. One I registered in 2019 looks exactly like one I registered last Tuesday. No dust, no faded packaging, nothing in the corner reminding you it's been there a while.
Then the renewal notice shows up and it's eleven or twelve dollars. That's nothing. So we renew.
Do that with five hundred questionable names and you're spending close to six grand a year to store inventory that hasn't produced an inquiry since you bought it.
That's dead stock.
Domains are different from sweaters in one important way, and it's the difference that keeps all of us renewing. A domain can wake up. A technology shows up out of nowhere. A term goes from nothing to everywhere in eighteen months. A funded company launches with a name that sits two words away from yours. Something you've held for eight years lights up on a Tuesday afternoon and suddenly you look brilliant.
That possibility is what makes dropping names so hard.
But "somebody might want it someday" can't be the thesis behind every name in the account. If it is, you don't have a portfolio. You've got a storage unit.
Retail handles slow inventory with markdowns and liquidation, and we have versions of both. A name that's been sitting at $4,995 for six years without a single inquiry might tell you something interesting at $2,495. A name you've stopped believing in can go wholesale, where somebody else's math works better than yours. Some names belong on a liquidation platform before they expire rather than quietly dropping. And some just shouldn't be renewed at all.
The trick is deciding before renewal day, not the morning of.
Retailers run inventory aging reports. Nothing stops us from doing the same thing, and it takes an afternoon. Sort the portfolio by acquisition date and start with anything you've held five years or longer. How many inquiries has it pulled? Are more companies using that term today than when you bought it, or fewer? Would you register the name again today at the price it costs to renew it?
That last one does most of the work.
If you wouldn't spend twelve dollars to buy the name this afternoon, it's fair to ask why you're spending twelve dollars to keep it.
Sometimes there's a real answer. You've had offers. You know something about the term that the reg fee doesn't reflect. You've watched the market move toward it and you want another year. That's fine. Renew it and go do something else.
But sometimes the honest answer is that you already own it, and paying the renewal is easier than admitting the buy was wrong. I've done it. I've got names I've renewed every year since 2017 that have never generated one inquiry, and I keep them because dropping them means agreeing with a version of me I'd rather not agree with.
The math is also about to get slightly worse. Verisign's wholesale .com price moves from $10.26 to $10.97 on November 1, and registrars will pass that along the way they always do. Seventy-one cents is nothing on one name. On five hundred names it's another $355 a year to hold the stuff you were already unsure about.
So go sort your portfolio by the date you bought them and start at the oldest.
You already know which names you're going to argue with yourself about. Start there.