Here’s how my first sale went down.
At NamesCon this year I met up with Ryan McKegney of domain sales service DomainAgents. After talking with him, I finally decided to take the ten minutes necessary to add my domain portfolio to DomainAgents.
This month I made my first sale with DomainAgents, but it actually wasn’t one of the domains I listed for sale. It was just a lead that came in through one of DomainAgents partners.
DomainAgents has deals with domain registrars, Whois sites and name spinners/suggestion tools. It syndicates some domain listings to them and also lets people make an offer on any domain name. In my case, the partner that generated the lead was a name spinning site.
Here’s the kicker: Potential buyers have to pay a $19.95 fee to submit an offer. They get their money back if they don’t receive a response from the owner.
DomainAgents pays domain owners $10 for responding to an offer. So even if the buyer doesn’t make a good offer, at least you’re getting a little bit of money for your time.
The other interesting thing is that the buyer pays all of the fees for the transaction, including DomainAgents’ fee. As a seller, you just see their offer and your counteroffers. The buyer, on the other hand, sees the itemized fees when they interact with the negotiation system.
Once a deal is struck, it’s sent to Escrow.com as a brokerage transaction.
I ended up selling my domain for about what I would have received after the commission had it been sold at my “buy now” price listed on Afternic.
Even though the domain I sold wasn’t listed on DomainAgents, I think it’s worth taking ten minutes to add your portfolio there. You never know…
I’ve sold a few domains through domainagents. I’ve never listed anything but i get an offer through them once every couple weeks or so. Usually never amounts to anything but there was a few sales.
Interesting!
How many domains you have in total?
Over 20k
I havnt listed my names there but I get offers all the time. The all max out at $200. I find that the nature of that service appeals to people who dont know much about domains (dont use whois, intimidated by going through a landing page) which tends to mean they do not place a high value on domains. Same way that offers from godaddy’s buy service tend to be low. At least thats my experience.
Same experience here. Very low initial offers and then things never go much of anywhere from there. The buyer folds almost immediately at or around their initial price.
I agree with the basic idea that the service appeals to people who don’t have much knowledge. Why they also all seem to have very low budgets is a mystery, but I guess other sellers sometimes have better luck.
Congrats Andrew!
Would have been better to know the name and amount you sold for.
Anyhow, thanks for sharing.
It was only about a $2500 sale, but like I said I netted about what I expected when I listed it for sale. The buyer’s initial offer was only $200.
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Yeah, most offers come with $199 or $200 thinking they will get at that price or somewhere around that only.
As a rule I never respond to their offers and solicitation emails, historically their buyers aren’t paying much, usually in the few hundreds range at most. Better ignore them and wait for buyers to come direct.
>> Potential buyers have to pay a $19.95 fee to submit an offer. They get their money back if they don’t receive a response from the owner.
When someone sends an email to me from a whois lookup I auto reply with a link to buy now if I have one. These shady people submit my buy now price to their customer even though I will never use their system and of course I never see the $10.
I don’t understand. Who are “these shady people” submitted a buy now price to their customer?
They charged their customer $19.95 for nothing because their customer will never be successful in buying one of my domain names on their system. They represented to their customer that I used their system to respond to their customer’s offer.
Maybe if I illustrate the sequence of events it will be easier to understand. 1. Their customer makes an offer on one of my names using their system. 2. Their system uses whois to send me an email. 3. I auto-reply to their email with a buy now link. 4. Someone at Domain Agents manually enters my buy now price. 5. The customer assumes I used their system to make a counter offer. 6 The customer is not entitled a refund because they claim I used their system to respond. 7. The customer had zero % chance of completing a sale through Domain Agents.
Ah, well perhaps instead of #3 you should put the price in the system and pocket $10 🙂
Congrats on the sale and thanks for inside information on transactions with DomainAgents. 😉
DomainAgents has been a consistent source of sales for us over the years, very reliable.
I have one domain I want to sell it can any 1 help me
The seller can also tell domainagents that they do not want to use escrow.com in which case Payoneer and escrow.domains can be both used instead of escrow.com
personally i think most lower end domainers have their heads up their proverbial.
remember you have a commodity your bought with the intention of selling,
therefore any offer is a good offer.
I got some offers through them.
None of them was higher than 200usd.
It seems to me they attract specific low budget buyers.
I have Primecurb.com for Amazon Whole Foods delivery services. Hopefully it sells but I will try domainagent also
Most of my sales come from Sedo, Afternic/GoDaddy.
I’ll def try domainagents.com as well.
My sales are usually in the $2K to $12 K
Thanks for the write up Andrew and congrats on the sale!
We always recommend at least countering a low opening offer. Since we don’t publish sales results, people don’t realize how many buyers we work with but we were the 5th highest grossing broker on Escrow.com last year and were given an award from them at Namescon. A lot of those small opening offers turn into $2500 or $5000 sales like they did in Andrew’s case, but buyers are of course always looking to make the best deal they can and they’ll start low.
Andrew
why don’t you come up and say what is the domain? and the price you got? rather than make it a mystery to prompt those people for nothing.
It’s possible that some potential buyers use DomainAgents as a way to circumvent high fixed-price listings on other platforms. After I removed buy-now prices on other platforms, in favor of minimum offers, offers from DomainAgents ceased.
Someone from this company offered me the $199 for my domain. I don’t really want to sell my domain..it would have to be really worth it. Went countering do I just put an absurd amount to start and see their next bid? Is that how that works? Thanks
I got a offer of $2500. I demanded $10k settled on $7k. WAITING for buyer to complete on escrow.com