A company that has tasked itself with “building e-commerce 3.0” has launched an infrastructure product on an exclusive three-letter .com domain name.
Rye, co-founded by former Goldman Sachs and Reddit employee Arjun Bhargava, builds developer tools and APIs to help creators build new and innovative e-commerce products. For example, developers will be able to use Rye to retrieve product data from a global inventory of Shopify and Amazon stores, allowing anyone to sell products to their own audience in exchange for an affiliate commission.
Rye operates on Rye.com, a domain name that it looks to have acquired in July 2022 after the domain was transferred from Uniregistry to a privacy-protected NameCheap account. According to a Dofo interview from 2020, Richard Lau owned the domain.
From what I can tell, Rye originally used the Operator brand name with the Operator.com domain name for this venture, with the company’s name listed as Operator Labs Worldwide, Inc. For whatever reason, when the product launched, the company transitioned to Rye and Rye.com. As of publishing, Operator.com redirects to Rye.com.
It’s clear, though, that this new brand was set on launching on a premium domain.