Indonesian TLD .id

.id is the top-level domain (TLD) for Indonesia. Until a few years ago, Indonesians can only register names under 2nd-level domain (2LD) such as mycompany.co.id or myblog.my.id. Note the extra characters before ".id".

Did I say "Indonesians"? In order to register, you must submit Indonesian government-issued identity. For some 2LDs, you must submit additional documents such as your company's certificate of incorporation. Of course, it didn't prevent non-Indonesians to register domains through a proxy. Indonesians or not, it was a lot of hassle.

Thankfully, PANDI, the body that governs .id TLD, has relaxed the requirements. They opened up .id in 2014 so you can have awesome.id instead of awesome.my.id. In August 2017, they waived the identity check so now everyone (not only Indonesians) can register a .id! (Do note that some 2LDs still require verifications).

Which brings me to this post: I've just launched Punya Nama, where anyone can register .id. It's still an MVP, so feedbacks are most welcome.

"I'm not Indonesian, and my business is not targeting Indonesia—why should I get a .id?" Depending on the nature and the stage of your business, ignoring the world's 4th most populous country is probably not a good idea. Search engines such as Google prioritize country-specific TLDs—when someone searches for "pilates", everything else equal, "pilates.id" would come up first.

If you're not interested with Indonesia, you might want to get a .id because of it's catchy name, just like .io or .me. You can have printed.id, vital.id, basically every.id (see what I did here?).

What are you waiting for? Go ahead check some premium .id names at Punya Nama.

Sarah Shopper the price tracker for Lazada and others

For the past few months, I've been busy working on a new project. Now that it's quite stable, I'm happy to share it here.

Sarah Shopper is a chatbot that helps you track price from popular ecommerce websites such as Amazon.com, IKEA, Lazada, and some other websites in Southeast Asia region. If you are amongst the people who want to get the lowest price for each of the purchase you make, Sarah Shopper is great news for you. Just send her a link, and she will notify you when the price drops.

For example, I've been meaning to buy a Google Pixel phone, but I can't justify the price. So I search for that phone on Lazada, and then share the link to the product page to Sarah on Messenger. So far, the price has dropped three times, but it's still too expensive for me 😂.

Price tracking (or price monitoring) is not a new concept, but most services focus on Amazon.com and available as a website or Chrome extension. I decided to do it differently. Sarah Shopper is a price watcher for Lazada from the comfort of messaging apps.

Sarah Shopper was initially available on Messenger, but now you can also chat with her on Google Assistant and LINE. Go ahead, click those links and try it yourself.