.shop sells 50,000 domains on launch day

The registry behind the .shop generic top-level domain name has sold more than 50,000 domains on its launch day.

Japan-based domain name company GMO Registry launched its .shop domain for general availability on Monday, September 26.

The .shop domain is for online and offline shops and is targeted at the business-to-business e-commerce market and corporations.

Further, the registry company said that 39,801 domains were sold in 30 minutes and within two hours the number had grown to 45,427.

The number totalled 51,755 at the end of the launch day.

More than 1,000 names were registered by trademark owners during the earlier sunrise period and around 5,000 during the early access period.

At the time of writing, the .shop domain had reached  70,046 registrations.