Just opened an account with SmartName last week and have been experimenting with their SmartShops offering.   It’s too soon to see revenue or search engine rankings, but so far I’m impressed with the quality of the storefronts it creates.

SmartShops looks to be particularly suited for exact match product domains (both .com and alternative extensions). The main benefit of SmartShops is that it automatically creates good looking ecommerce minisites that look more like ‘real’ sites than traditional parking or Adsense filled mini site pages.    Here is an  example of a site I created today in less than five minutes…

I like the fact that there are no Adsense ads, so it doesn’t look like a standard parking page.  Smartname monetizes the sites using Shopping.com and pays per click (not action).   This means that if your domain is highly targeted, you should be able to earn income when visitors browse your site, regardless of whether they make the final purchase online.

As you can see above, my test site allows visitors to browse by price or brand name and hopefully will  be viewed as a useful resource by anyone typing in home deep fryers.

Smartshops also offers some great customization options, including the ability to…

• upload custom header graphics and text
• upload a custom banner on top of all pages (good for linking back to a portfoilio page)
• display a contact page or have domain sales handled directly by a BuyDomains broker (your choice)
• enter conversion tracking urls and custom tracking pixels
• add social networking buttons (e.g. delicious, digg, stumbleupon, twitter, etc.)
• enter search engine verification codes for Google, Bing and Yahoo

With a little work it should be possible to customize Smartname storefronts so that they are useful and attractive enough to be favorably viewed by non-domainers and linked to by related sites.   If this is possible, these ’sites’ are far more likely to achieve search engine traction and good rankings for their exact match keywords.

Next step will be to customize a few of these sites and do some basic link promotion.   Hope to blog about my results later this week.

Thanks to Bruce Marler for putting me in touch with the SmartName crowd and encouraging me to try out the service.