NameJet needs to make some changes to improve its results.
It’s been a rough year or so at domain marketplace NameJet.
First, there was the shill bidding scandal last summer.
Then, the company re-lost its Tucows expired inventory to rival GoDaddy. This is despite Tucows owning half of NameJet, so that wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence.
It also lost Name.com inventory. And Namecheap.
Those were big blows. NameJet is mostly left with Web.com’s registrars and Enom, plus pending-delete domain names and private seller inventory. A drop in the Chinese market is also hurting.
Last month, NameJet had $259,000 of sales over the $2,000 mark. It had $744,000 in the same month last year. That might have been an outlier because of a lot of three letter inventory, but I checked year-over-year sales for the past five months and they are all down except for August, which was essentially flat.
This could be somewhat of a death spiral. NameJet needs to reinvest in the business, but it also needs to make the case to its owners that it’s worth making the investment in light of lower revenue. I hope they choose to invest in the business because the industry needs at least two solid competitors for direct-transfer expired domains.
Here are some inexpensive ways that NameJet can improve its business.
1. Fix its app.
NameJet might have beaten GoDaddy to the market with its app, but NameJet’s is inferior. It never alerts me when an auction is ending even though I have it set up for alerts. There also doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to the ordering of domains in the app and it seems to reorder whenever you go back to the same screen.
Alerts are the only thing keeping me on top of auctions at GoDaddy, so this is a big deal. Because I usually forget about the auctions, it’s not worth my time to research domains at NameJet to backorder.
During one week last month, I had a dozen auctions. I would have bid higher than the closing price on at least four of them. I might not have won, but not getting alerts led directly to lost money for NameJet and its partners. And I’m just one small bidder. I would start bidding on NameJet again if it improved its app.
2. Modernize the design.
Remember activist investor J. Carlo Cannell and his gripes about former NameJet co-owner Rightside? While I don’t agree with everything he said, I agree with this:
The user interfaces at eNom and Namejet look and feel clumsy and stale. Looking past the main page of NAME’s sites, the logged-in front-end infrastructure is untouched and acts like time capsule to what existed half a decade ago.
Frankly, I don’t need an interface change. But the graphics NameJet uses to promote auctions do not instill confidence in the platform. A Snappa subscription should do the trick.
3. Change the private-seller system.
I think quite a few investors now filter out domains that have a reserve when searching on NameJet. The same inventory is listed over and over. NameJet should limit the number of times a seller can list the same domain with a reserve during the year. If they want to list it again, make them drop the reserve substantially.
Also, NameJet needs to continue to work on building up confidence in the integrity of its marketplace after the bidding scandal last year. People won’t bid if they don’t trust the system.
Most of these fixes are fairly easy and I believe they will lead to improved results on NameJet. Perhaps NameJet can win more partner inventory if its results improve.
Barry Felds says
How about they actually accept names from people outside of the cool club…
And stop with the Bullshit of exclusive and quality names..
Take a look at the expired inventory and some of the names from the cool club…
Namejet is about who u are.. not what domains u have to list and sell..
Robert says
You must have really bad names… I am not part of any club, and got accepted pretty quickly… and list pretty mediocre names every month
Logan says
Yes, the ship NameJet is definitely listing.
Get it? Get it??
Trent says
I don’t trust namejet management, if they need to hide from their clients never a good thing, Where’s Jonathan.
Sorry, I don’t want to pay namejet a % fee for doing nothing.
The platform is lacking a lot of trust also, especially with many just under bid baits, and alt accounts trying to create bidding wars.
Management has failed this company, they all deserved to be fired.
The APP is an absolute joke, 2011 edition, no features, or functions, truly sad.
The writing is on the wall, we saw the same thing with Pheenix back in the day.
Only a few large players keep the lights on at namejet.
David says
I have always done well as a private seller at NameJet. I do miss working with Laurie greatly.
The points made in this post are very good recommendations.
I also think NameJet needs to better define itself. Are they like Godaddy with expired domains, or are they more like Sedo geared towards private sellers. Do they want a brokerage side?
The more they do to satisfy the needs of domain investors, the better they will be. Aftermarket domains are mostly an investor market in my opinion.
Thanks for the post.
John says
4. Stop requiring the business and success killing abomination known as the Estibot “appraisal” figure to appear with listings (or anything like it).
See this for more: http://www.ricksblog.com/2018/09/great-domains-represent-generational-wealth-and-why-valuation-tools-are-a-cancer-on-this-industry/
I will never ever do anything with NJ because of that. And I already know someone who was with NJ thought I had some great names, so their loss too.
Joe says
Agree with Barry, I tried to list names twice (far better than what’s currently on the site) and the customer experience was very painful and the process convoluted. As they say, they had one job …
PageHowe.compage howe says
well as long as we are making suggestions….
biggest gripe has always been the search, sometime you can know a name is at namejet and the search reveals nothing….
they missed searching across tlds
and too many times when your setting up an advanced search, the system resets some selectors but not others.
then when you sort, you lose all your settings..
then theres the dark period between when a name is on pre-reserve, and before the auction starts, makes it seem name is gone, but it just comes back.
page.
TLDNIC says
this!
The search hardly ever delivers the name I’m searching for. So, I click on the first domain name on the homepage and overwrite the domain name at the end of the URL with the one I’m looking for. Downside: this only works for an exact SLD.TLD combo and not across multiple TLDs.
Thomas says
Namejet treats it’s clients like dirt, they charge a paypal surcharge even if you don’t use that payment method for everyone. They have put themselves first, and some of their dirty sellers also.
To be honest namejet is a company that doesn’t deserve to be in business.
Mark Thorpe says
What goes around, comes around.
They have no one to blame but themselves.
VM Freeman says
Along with the above-mentioned issues, I see one big barrier to success being the lack of an affiliate program, as the domain websites advertise and all link to GoDaddy, SnapNames, and DynaDot, without giving NameJet much, if any, online promotion.
VM Freeman
DomainRecap.com