When you receive a bid for a domain name listed at Afternic you are presented with a number of options.
First, you can accept the offer as is and execute the sale. But the bidder probably offered your minimum amount and you might want to get more. You can counter offer and negotiate with the buyer. Or you can just ignore the bid and wait for a higher offer. One option worth considering is changing your reserve bid to the offer amount. This basically says, “I’m willing to sell you the domain for your offer if no one else does better within the next 7 days.”
There’s a huge benefit to this. Names that have met the reserve show up in the “Closing Soon” box featured prominently on the Afternic home page. The only other active domain listings on the home page are the “Featured Listings” (which cost money) and “Showcase Domains” (which requires and exclusive sales agreement with Afternic). This is great exposure, as Mark at DomainRookie has found out. His HillaryAlert.com domain is in the Closing Soon section and Mark says the auction received 45 page views within 12 hours!
That doesn’t always lead to more bids, but it frequently happens. I had a domain that hadn’t received a single bid in a year. It received a minimum bid and I set the reserve to that price. It received 3 bids within the next 7 days.
You may wonder why there are so few domains in the Closing Soon section when you see that Afternic sells many domains each day. It’s because a number of the domains sold are accepted immediately or are pre-negotiated. Many of these domains sell through anonymous offers and are never listed on Afternic in the first place.
I highly recommend all domain name investors list their domains on Afternic and Sedo. I frequently receive offers on my domains at both of these great domain exchanges.
Leave a Comment