Here is a little from me about the recent sale of Candy.com. I will cover things that may get overlooked and a little bit of public info that I could dig up as well.

With the recent $3 Million dollar sale of Candy.com one thing often over looked is the attached  2% royalties off the gross for 15 years that will go to Rick Schwartz who sold the domain. This is a pretty big deal if you ask me and it’s often trumped by the big $3 Million dollar price tag. Plus Rick had a provision put in that if the buyer were to sell to a larger brand like Mars® or Hersey® Rick would get another payday. Very wise, but these also should not be over looked in the deal!! Congrats again to Rick and the Melville Candy Company.

With the July 1st launch date of Candy.com set, it will be exciting to see what the site will look like and function. Currently Melville uses MelvilleStore.com to offer it’s candy products on the web and MelvilleCandyCompany.com for it’s business. Another thing to watch will be if the Candy.com name by itself becomes Melville’s new "Brand" or if they will tie in the Candy.com to Melville Candy Company.

Will Candy.com look something similar to what MelvilleStore.com does now? We will have to wait 25 more days to see.

Although it was posted by Rick on June 3, 2009 that the deal was done on his blog RicksBlog.com, the whois didn’t change until June 5, 2009. It was also June 5th when the DNS changed to a one page lander with the press release on it.

Currently on Candy.com, is still a one page lander but today I noticed two new icon’s for Twitter and Facebook on the top of the page to help spread the word via social networks, along with the press release below them.

No links to MelvilleStore.com on the one page lander? No 301 temp redirect to MelvilleStore.com for Candy.com?

One thing I would of done until the new launch is still allow people to buy my candy! The traffic that Candy.com gets is very targeted and also likely to convert very well. According to Compete.com, Candy.com currently get’s 9,712 Unique visitors a month, and I would bet most of that is Direct Navigation as currently the site in at least Google has poor rankings for the term candy and was not advertised by Rick. It will be almost exactly 1 month from when Melville got the domain, until it’s launch of the new Candy.com site. To me, that’s nearly 10,000 paying customers they are leaving on the table.

According to Compete.com, the current domain used by the buyer’s of Candy.com, MelvilleStore.com holds 2,115 unique visitors per month. MelvilleStore.com is highly likely advertised on packaging and other ways by Melville Candy Company and Candy.com was Not by Rich Schwartz. This further shows the power of a generic domain name which also carries better targeted traffic.

Google currently shows a total of only 16 indexed pages for Candy.com. 4 of the 15 are candy.com while the other 12 are subdomain indexed with licorice.candy.com .

MelvilleStore.com currently holds 510 indexed pages.

Best of luck to Melville Candy Company, a company many of us never heard of before but will be known now by many because of a simple name. Candy.com! For those wondering why Mars, Heresy or any other large candy company didn’t purchase Candy.com… I would say it’s clear that they "don’t get it" when it comes generic domain names.