How To Resell Domains With ResellerClub And WHMCS

Want to become a domain registrar like GoDaddy, NameCheap, or even NameHero?

Using ResellerClub and WHMCS you can have a fully functioning domain reseller website live in under one hour!

For those unfamiliar, WHMCS is the world’s most popular web hosting automation and billing software.

It allows you to sell domain names and web hosting completely white-labeled to your business.

Using our Corporate Hero Reseller Account at NameHero, we give you all the tools to make this happen, including a free WHMCS license!

Setup Your Reseller Account

To get started, you need to first get your Reseller account online:

As stated above, you’ll want to go with our Corporate Reseller account as it comes with a complimentary WHMCS license.

This is valued at $15.95/month and with our current special going, you get WHMCS + a reseller web hosting account that allows you to also resell our high speed cloud hosting.

With our current Spring Sale, the Corporate Reseller is $21.42/month billed 24 months.  This price will change over the months, so please take advantage of this special while you can!

Choose Your Primary Domain

This is going to be the primary domain of your Reseller website.

For example, ours is NameHero.com, so you want to pick a name that is brandable, easy to remember, and spellable.

This is the domain you’re customers are going to be going to for their domain registrations, so make it simple on them!

If you already have your domain registered elsewhere (i.e. GoDaddy) I suggest using the “Transfer your domain from another registrar” option as it will make life so much easier.

If not, there is still the third option, “I will use my existing domain and update my nameservers” which allows you to leave your domain wherever it’s registered.

While this will still work, you’ll have to get with their support team / read their help articles to complete the next step.

Select Your Options

Reselling domains and web hosting is all about ROI.  You want to make the most possible and that’s why I HIGHLY recommend going with our 24 Month Price.

At NameHero we reward customers for paying longer than 1 year, by providing a free domain registration (or transfer) as well as a heavily discounted price. 

We’ve found monthly billing to be extremely inefficient here at NameHero as it only takes your credit card expiring to leave all of your customers suspended.  You don’t want such issues to happen!

By paying for several months in advance you don’t have to worry about making another payment for 2 years and this INCLUDES WHMCS! 

I also highly recommend the DropMySite Offsite Backups.

Since your website is going containing your customer’s data (their domains) you’re going to want to have multiple backups in multiple offsite locations for security.

This feature starts at $1.99/month for 5GB, so you definitely want to add it! You’ll sleep better!

Finally, you’ll want to select the option for the free WHMCS Starter License.

Complete Your Payment

I cannot promise this price will be available when you purchase your account!

We’re currently running our Spring promotion so coupons will come and go.

None-the-less, you’ll save the most, the longer you signup for :).

Register Your Name Servers

Once you complete your payment, you need to register your private name servers.

This is why it’s a good idea to register your domain with us, so you can do everything inside of our interface.

If your domain is registered somewhere else, you’ll have to go there to setup the nameservers.

If your domain is registered with us, follow these steps:

Login to our Client Interface -> Click Cloud Web Hosting -> Click On Your Package

Note your name server IPs:

Keep this page opened in a new window and click on Domains -> My Domains -> Yourdomain.com:

Under the Manage menu on the right, click on Private Nameservers:

Enter each name server IP from above in the form Register a NameServer Name:

Click Save Changes and repeat for the second nameserver.

Using the right menu again, click on Nameservers under Manage:

Change your domain to use your private nameservers:

Click Change Nameservers

Congratulations!  Everything is now setup!

It’s important to note, if your domain isn’t immediately online, the DNS is still propagating.  Historically, this process can be instant or can take up to a full 24 hours to become active.

Install WHMCS

Once your domain is active, you’re ready to get WHMCS installed.

Using our one-click installer, this process is extremely easy, with absolutely no coding or FTP needed!

To access the installer login to cPanel and click on WHMCS at the bottom under Softaculous Apps Installer:

Once inside, click Install Now!

Once inside, click the Quick Install button to make it very simple:

You’ll then have to fill out a couple simple form fields:

Choose Domain: Most likely you’ll only have one domain here to choose from.

In Directory: This is the directory you want WHMCS to be installed in.  If you want someone to see WHMCS as soon as they access your site (i.e. https://www.yourdomain.com) then leave this field blank.  If not, you can specify a directory such as billing (i.e. https://www.yourdomain.com/billing).

Data Directory: Leave this default; whmcsdata is fine.

Admin Folder: This is going to be the name of your admin area.  Make it hard to guess, but don’t use special characters as it won’t work.

Valid License Key: Remember, this comes free with your Corporate Hero Reseller account.  You can get it from our Client Area -> Cloud Web Hosting -> Corporate Hero -> Addons link under the Overview menu:

The license key will look something like this (notice the highlighting):

Admin Username: This is going to be your username to access WHMCS.  Make it hard to guess but no special characters (i.e. @, #, etc.).

Admin Password: This is going to be your password to access your WHMCS.  Click the key to generate a very strong password (please make it very strong).

Admin Email: This is going to be the email address associated with your WHMCS admin account.  Incase you ever lose your username/password, you’ll need this to reset it.  Make sure you have access to this address.

Click Install.

Congratulations – you’ve installed WHMCS!

Login To Your WHMCS Admin Area

Next, you have to do some simple configurations to WHMCS to make it function.

When you finish installing it, you’ll have a link to your admin area, but it’s going to be something like https://www.yourdomain.com/admindirectory

From here, login with the username and password you created:

Complete The Setup Wizard

The first time you login to WHMCS, you’re going to see their setup Wizard.  I highly recommend going through it step-by-step as it’ll help you make sure your initial settings are correct.  To begin click Next:

This is very basic information about your company.  If you don’t have a logo, you can always go back and add one later.

The most important field here is the email address as this will be the email address that all your emails that come from your system are sent to your customers.

You should make it one that they can easily reply to with questions.

The address will be shown on all of your invoices, so if you have a physical place of business, enter it in there.

Click Next once you’re finished and remember you can always change these settings later:

The next steps allow you the ability to start taking payments.

If you’re just getting started, you probably just want to use PayPal.

If you have an existing PayPal account for your business, enter the email address in here.

If you don’t have one yet, enter the email address you’d like to use, and when you receive your first payment, you’ll be emailed instructions on how to claim the payment and complete the setup of your account.

They also have the option here to setup your own merchant account which also gives you the ability to accept credit cards.

There is a bit more involved in this setup and I actually would recommend using Stripe.  Therefore I’d skip this for later if you’re wanting to use something other than PayPal.

I don’t however recommend accepting payments mailed in.  This is 2018, if people are still having to mail in payments, there is a slim chance you’re going to get paid.

Click Next to proceed:

This next step is very important.  It is the step that is going to allow you the ability to process domain name registrations and transfers.

The first option you should check to enable it.  I would also enable the recommend Popular TLDs.

The price is going to be the price to your customers.  I would set this at $14.95 but we’re going to edit that later in this tutorial.

For this tutorial, we’re going to be using Reseller Club.  I do not recommend Enom!

Enom used to be the “go to” choice for resellers.  However, they were recently acquired by Tucows and their support is awful (it was actually bad before the acquisition but now they don’t seem to be to much focused on gaining new business).

I’ll show how to integrate Reseller Club in a few more steps.

Click Next to proceed:

This step is going to integrate your NameHero Reseller account with WHMCS so you can offer your customers web hosting.

You can find your Hostname in the same step above where you found your nameserver IPs.  For this example, mine is silas.uswebhost.com.

Your username and password are going to be inside of your welcome email from NameHero under New Account Info.

If you haven’t receive it yet, you can view all emails inside our Client Portal -> Hover Over Your Name -> Email History:

Once you enter this information, click Verify Connection and it’ll populate the other fields.

Click Next and then Finish to complete the setup wizard.

Congratulations – you’re almost ready to begin selling domains!

Setup Reseller Club

Once you complete the setup wizard, you’ll be left on your main admin dashboard.

To setup and configure ResellerClub, you need to hover over Setup, Products/Services, Domain Registrars:

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Activate next to ResellerClub:

Next, you’ll need to register for your free Reseller Club account.  You can do so at this link.

Fill out all the requested information and click Submit:

Give it a few minutes and you’ll receive an email with all your account details.

Go back to your WHMCS domain registrar setup page and enter the required information:

Your ResellerID will be inside your welcome email. It can also be found inside your ResellerClub account by hover over the user icon:

The APIKey is found inside the ResellerClub interface by hovering over Settings -> API:

Click the View API key link and copy/paste this into WHMCS:

Click Save Changes inside WHMCS.:

Whitelist Your IPs

On the same page you retrieved your API key, you need to whitelist your NameHero IPs to have access to their API.

You get these IPs from the same place you got your Name Server IPs above (from the NameHero client area):

You want to whitelist all three of these IPs inside ResellerClub’s user interface:

Click Save whitelisted IP addresses.

Congratulations – you’ve integrated your ResellerClub account!

Setup Domain Pricing

The final step is to setup your TLDs as well as the price your customers are going to pay.

Inside of WHMCS admin -> Setup -> Products/Services -> Domain Pricing:

You’ll notice the TLDs from the setup wizard appear here.  Under Auto Registration you want to select ResellerClub:

Click Save Changes.

Next, you’ll want to click on Open Pricing beside each TLD and set the prices for your customers:

You’ll notice WHMCS allows you to set different pricing depending on the number of years the customer decides to register for.  This is where you can reward them for longevity.

At this time, it’s a good idea to review your ResellerClub pricing so you can make sure you’re setting the prices higher than your cost for the domain.

You can find the domain prices inside your ResellerClub interface -> Settings -> Manage Products and Pricing:

Scroll down the page and click on Domain Registration:

Then click on Manage Prices:

From this screen, you can see your cost (in light gray) and the bold represents the price after markup.  In my case, the domains are set for about 35% markup:

Use this to set your prices for each TLD accordingly.  You can also use this list to add some of the new gTLDs (i.e. .cleaning, .click, etc.).

Once you finish all this you’re all set!  It does take some time to get all the data entered, but I would suggest going for the most popular TLDs first as you’ll find they make up most of your orders.

Finally, when you’re ready to start selling, you’ll need to fund your Reseller Club account by going to My Billing -> Add Funds:

Congratulations – you’re now ready to start reselling domains with Reseller Club!

How To Setup ResellerClub In WHMCS Tutorial

I’ve covered a lot in this post!  I’ve also filmed a video tutorial on our official YouTube channel that will allow you the ability to follow-along step-by-step:

Let us know if you have any questions!