.微店
Is .微店 a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .微店, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A Chinese label for tiny social-selling shops, but those sellers live inside big platforms and rarely want their own web address.
small Chinese-language social-commerce sellers and micro-shop owners who want a storefront identity outside the major platforms
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round; a Chinese-script IDN (“micro store”, A-label xn--hxt2x). Their catalog line: “A small shop, built for social selling.”
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet exactly: a plain Chinese-script common noun for "online shop" sold as the address a small independent merchant puts their own storefront identity on, which only works if Chinese sellers accept a descriptive shop-word as a namespace instead of a marketplace subdomain.
A generic Chinese retail-premises noun aimed at the same buyer — any seller wanting "my shop" as its own address — differing from the target only in scale connotation, not in the kind of word or the kind of registrant.
Also a Chinese-script generic commerce noun for the same shopkeeper audience, but "mall" leans toward an aggregator or large multi-vendor operator rather than the single micro-merchant the target's "micro" framing courts.
What a .微店 domain is
.微店 is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody is chasing .微店 today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .微店 domain extension real yet?
.微店 is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .微店 domain?
You can’t yet. A .微店 name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .微店 was .网店, delegated on 2 December 2014.
Is .微店 a real TLD?
Not yet. .微店 is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .微店 and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.微店 (micro store) · Digital & Retail · “A small shop, built for social selling.””Journey To The West Corporation
- Band 10-29 (vanity/narrow). The term 微店 describes a real, large activity — micro social-selling shops in China — but by analogy with prior Chinese-script commerce IDN TLDs (.商城, .商店, .网店-style strings), such TLDs have seen volume- or price-driven registrations with negligible primary-identity use, since Chinese micro-sellers transact inside WeChat/Weidian/Taobao ecosystems rather than on standalone websites; that analogy is the core of this judgment. It is not band 30-49 because there is little evidence (again by analogy) of sustained volume registration or any brand signal for Chinese commerce IDNs, and universal-acceptance plus in-China licensing friction further suppress serious use. It is not band 1-9 because a genuine Chinese-language buyer population exists and the string is a natural, well-understood commerce word. A further drag: 微店 is also widely recognized in China as the name of an established social-commerce platform, so a serious merchant using the string as independent identity risks confusion with that platform. Main market uncertainty: whether Chinese social sellers develop any appetite for off-platform web storefront identities in the next 5 years — today's platform-centric behavior could shift, which would raise the ceiling.