OpenSRS and Storefront — How They Work Together

If you're an existing OpenSRS reseller setting up Storefront for the first time, you might notice that the two products feel different, have different URLs, and have different capabilities. Storefront and OpenSRS are tightly connected, but it's important to understand how they relate, differ, and work together.

The three pieces

There are three distinct interfaces involved, and it's worth being clear on what each one is for.

OpenSRS (the Reseller Control Panel) is your wholesale registrar account. It's your relationship with Tucows as a domain reseller. A funded domain registrar account that is used to register your domains, manage your reseller settings, and access the full OpenSRS product catalog. Your customers never see or interact with OpenSRS directly.

Storefront is the retail layer built on top of your OpenSRS account. It has two parts:

• The customer-facing store — a branded website your customers visit to search for and buy domains, check out with a credit card, log in to manage their domains and renewals, and handle everything they need as your domain customers. This is the public-facing storefront that lives at your username.shopco.com URL (or your custom domain).
• Storefront Manager — a separate administrative interface that only you (the reseller) can access, at manage.shopco.com. This is where you manage everything about your store: view and manage the customers who have signed up, see the orders they've placed and the domains they've purchased, set pricing, configure branding, connect your Stripe account, manage DNS for customer domains, review event logs, run reports, and control all of your store settings. Think of it as your back-office control panel for the retail store.

A useful way to think about it: OpenSRS is your registrar account, the customer-facing Storefront is your shop window, and Storefront Manager is your back office.

How they connect

When a customer buys a domain through your Storefront, here's what actually happens:

1. Your customer searches for a domain and adds it to their cart on your customer-facing store.
2. They check out and pay by credit card. Stripe collects the payment and deposits it directly into your connected bank account.
3. Behind the scenes, OpenSRS registers the domain at the wholesale cost on your behalf, debiting that amount from your OpenSRS account balance. A Storefront processing fee is also deducted.
4. The domain appears in your Storefront Manager under that customer's account, and in your customer's portal where they can manage DNS, renew, and so on.

Your customers only ever see steps 1–2. Steps 3–4 happen automatically and invisibly. OpenSRS, your customer store, and Storefront Manager work together seamlessly, but they're separate products with separate interfaces.

Why your OpenSRS account balance needs to stay funded

Stripe is collecting money from customers, so why does the OpenSRS balance also need to stay funded?

The answer is that they're two separate transactions. Your Stripe account is your own, not Tucows'. Stripe collects your revenue; that money is yours and goes straight to your bank. OpenSRS separately bills you the wholesale domain cost from your OpenSRS balance. If your OpenSRS balance runs out, new domain registrations will fail even if your customers could pay successfully via Stripe.

Your OpenSRS account balance is your working capital for fulfilling orders. Keeping enough in your balance to cover a typical week of expected orders prevents failures.

Add funds at any time in the Reseller Control Panel. Storefront Manager will show a warning on your dashboard when your balance drops below $25.

Why not all OpenSRS TLDs are available in Storefront

OpenSRS supports hundreds of TLDs across gTLDs and ccTLDs. Storefront supports a growing but curated subset of those. Most TLDs that are in OpenSRS but not yet in Storefront are on the roadmap. A small number have registry requirements (such as manual approval processes) that make them unsuitable for automated self-service purchase.

See the full current list of supported Storefront TLDs.

If a TLD you want to offer isn't in Storefront, you can still register and manage those domains for your customers through the OpenSRS RCP, they just won't appear in your Storefront for either you or your customers to be able to manage there.

Why some OpenSRS features aren't in Storefront yet

Storefront is a newer, actively developed product being built out incrementally. Some things available in your OpenSRS account aren't yet available in Storefront. Most of these features are on Storefront's product roadmap. For example:

• Email hosting — not yet available as a Storefront product
• SSL certificates — not yet available as a Storefront product
• Premium and aftermarket domains — not yet available as a Storefront product
• Multiple OpenSRS sub-accounts — Storefront Manager login uses your primary OpenSRS credentials; sub-accounts are not separately supported yet

Storefront is released on a regular cadence. You can follow what's been shipped and what's coming at opensrs.com/storefront-roadmap-release-notes.

If something you expected to work in Storefront isn't available, it's most likely a feature that exists in OpenSRS but hasn't yet been brought to Storefront — not a bug. Contact OpenSRS Support if you'd like confirmation on whether something specific is on the roadmap or to request additional features.

Summary

Questions? Contact OpenSRS Support.

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