.store vs .com: what evidence exists on performance

The evidence cited here that.store outperforms.com comes from the domain trade itself: one pair of stores in an experiment commissioned by.store Domains, a Radix initiative, and a Wix analysis that calls its own finding an association. Google says a top-level domain doesn't affect performance in Google Search. The one large survey cited here, run by Nielsen for ICANN in 2016, found people less comfortable giving personal information to sites on new extensions, and it did not test.store. None of the sources cited here replicates the comparison.

What did the registry-commissioned experiment measure?

Contrast, which ran it, wrote that.store Domains commissioned an experiment comparing two new stores selling the same products, matched on pages and paid search campaigns, one on.store and one on.com. The hosting site, get.store, is a Radix initiative, and IANA lists Radix as the sponsoring organization for.store. The write-up is dated November 29, 2023 and carries no independent audit. It says the blog content was reworded, the colors, images and fonts differed slightly, and the authors can't discount that those differences affected their results. In its 5 months of paid search, brandname.com recorded 1,819 clicks and 24 sales, and brandname.store 2,229 clicks and 33 sales. Over 12 months of organic search, Search Console showed 24,822 impressions and 333 clicks for.com against 49,939 impressions and 623 clicks for.store, at average positions of 33 and 31.6. The registry's pages turn that into 87% more organic clicks and 101% more search impressions.

For illustration: 623 clicks against 333 is 87% more, and 49,939 impressions against 24,822 is 101% more, the two figures the registry's pages quote.

The write-up flags limits itself. The.com store got its 34 pages fully crawled and indexed 30% faster, and its table gives an average organic click-through rate of 1.3% for.com and 1.2% for.store. Paid spend varied between the two ad accounts, and the authors say they could not measure the statistical significance of conversion or cost per acquisition. The registry's later post says the test covered one pair of stores and is not a prediction of your store's traffic. The write-up itself concludes that its results suggest Google preferred the.store domain, while Google's FAQ says the TLD doesn't affect performance in Google Search.

For illustration: 24 sales from 1,819 clicks is 1.32% and 33 sales from 2,229 clicks is 1.48%, and a two-proportion z-test on those four counts gives a p-value of about 0.67, so the gap is well inside chance.

What does the Wix analysis measure?

Wix, an ICANN-accredited domain registrar by its own description, published a report on Aug 24, 2026 built on nearly a million Wix domain registrations. It says ecommerce sites with a.store extension earn 10% more revenue than sites with a.com extension and 2x more than.shop or.net, among Wix Premium users worldwide with a connected domain between 2025 and 2026. The page doesn't print how many.store sites were compared, how revenue was measured or what was held constant. Wix's own wording is that such extensions are associated with stronger results, and the same report says.com is generally the best domain extension for websites. The registry's blog calls the finding an association within Wix's customer data, not evidence that adopting.store causes higher revenue.

What do consumer surveys say about new extensions?

Nielsen ran an online survey for ICANN from April 12 to May 2, 2016, with 5,452 consumers aged 18 and over in 24 countries who spend at least 5 hours a week online. It asked about new generic extensions as a group, and the ones it showed, including.club,.xyz,.online and.site, did not include.store. ICANN's summary says 91 percent rated.COM,.NET and.ORG as trustworthy destinations, and that consumers reported being less comfortable giving personal information on a site using a new gTLD than a legacy gTLD or ccTLD. In the full report, 62% said they would be very or somewhat comfortable inputting financial information on a.com site and 36% on a site with a new gTLD like.club or.bank. In Europe the shares were 52% and 24%. Those are stated attitudes from 2016, not clicks or purchases.

What do these sources leave unmeasured?

None of the sources cited here compares click-through or conversion between.store and.com across independent stores, with a method that separates the extension from everything else that differs between shops. Shops that choose.store may differ from shops that keep.com in age, niche, brand and ad budget, and one store per arm can't tell the extension from chance. Google's pages are official documentation, and its SEO Starter Guide says Google Search doesn't care which TLD you use. The experiment is one vendor-commissioned comparison. Those are different strengths of evidence, not a tie.

How do you test it on your own store?

1. Judge any claim with four questions: who measured it, how many stores, over which dates, and what was held constant. Pass: all four are printed, as they are for the ICANN survey. Fail: a percentage with none of them.
2. Measure who assumes the other extension. If you own both, forward the one you don't use to your store with a tagged URL, for example utm_source=other-extension and utm_medium=redirect, and watch those sessions in GA4.
3. Check your brand searches. In Search Console, add a Queries containing filter for your brand name plus the other extension, for example brandname.com. Google omits anonymized queries once a query filter is applied, so read the count as a floor.
4. Compare each count with your brand traffic: forwarded sessions against all direct sessions, and clicks on those queries against all brand-query clicks. A rising share is a reason to keep the other extension registered and forwarded. Pass: you have shares you can recompute next quarter. Fail: you chose from a percentage on a domain seller's page.

Sources, 30 September 2026: .store vs.com SEO/SEM experiment (Contrast for.store Domains, 2023); How to Increase Online Store Revenue (.store registry blog, 2026); Is.store Trustworthy? (.store registry blog, 2026); The Top Domain Extensions of 2026 (So Far) (Wix, 2026); ICANN-commissioned study announcement (ICANN, 2016); Global Consumer Research, Wave 2 (Nielsen for ICANN, 2016); .STORE delegation record (IANA, 2026); FAQ: Site Position in Google Search (Google, 2026); SEO Starter Guide (Google, 2026); Search Console filters (Google, 2026); Search Console dimensions (Google, 2026).

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