Here are four improvements GoDaddy should make for its aftermarket business.
GoDaddy continues to grow its aftermarket business. It has acquired massive portfolios and won exclusive partnerships with registrars to auction their expiring domain inventory.
That said, the company has many improvements to make. I often share feedback directly with companies but it always helps to nudge them a bit by writing about it. Companies have lots of things on their to-do list, so a little nudge might get some action.
Here are four things I think GoDaddy should do to improve its aftermarket experience.
Improve the For Sale Landers
It’s great that GoDaddy now allows domainers to use its Afternic for-sale landers. That said, these need improvement. This is low-hanging fruit and given that GoDaddy has a large portfolio of names to sell now, should boost both domainer sales and GoDaddy’s NameFind sale.
The first thing that’s wrong with the lander is its responsiveness. Once a domain goes past 11 or 12 characters the TLD gets pushed to two lines on a full laptop display. Here’s an example:
The mobile experience also needs work. Here’s what this domain looks like on my iPhone:
Another thing that many people have asked for is GoDaddy branding on these landers. Even if it’s “Afternic Powered By GoDaddy” with the GoDaddy logo, this will instill trust in people that have never heard of Afternic before.
Delete domain names from within the app
GoDaddy’s Investor App is brilliant in its simplicity. I do all of my bidding from the app, not the site. One feature I’d really like is the ability to delete domains from your watch or bidding list in the app if you no longer want to bid on them.
Perhaps it’s because the domain has gotten too expensive or you just decide you no longer want to bid on it. Either way, the app can get very cluttered with domains. Since you can swipe right to bid, why not make it so you can swipe left to delete?
Bulk Watch capabilities
GoDaddy Auctions lets you bulk bid for domains. But many people prefer to watch domains rather than bid on them immediately so they don’t tip off other people about their bidding intentions.
You can do this by adding domains to the watch list, but this requires searching for each domain individually and clicking the watch icon. It would save lots of time if you could bulk watch domains, kind of like how you can bulk backorder domains on NameJet.
As for bulk bidding, this isn’t something I do often. I tried it last week and ran into lots of problems. I got many errors, and when I fixed them I still couldn’t submit the names.
Include the sale price on Afternic emails
Elliot Silver mentioned this the other day and I feel his pain. When you get an email from Afternic saying that your domain sold you then have to log into Afternic to see how much it sold for. It seems like it would be fairly easy to pull this data into the email.
Lots to do
I realize that Godaddy is devoting development resources to integrating Afternic into GoDaddy and many other aftermarket projects. But it seems like these shouldn’t require much work. If I were to vote for the top two, I’d say fixing the for sale landers and adding bulk watch capabilities. The landers should be very easy to fix.
Better admin area in afternic. Love if I could download a custom report from there. Names sold this month. Last year. This year etc. Try copying and pasting from the “sold” section there and it’s miserably painful. Usually get dupes if you can copy it at all. As a result my reps send me a report now. Seems like more work for them than to fix the admin console.
Love the feedback, thanks Andrew.
All of which has been provided before, so it’s time to DO 😉 some of these have been mentioned for years and still nothing.
We’re going to start testing a GoDaddy branded for sale lander by the end of the week. This is a direct result of feedback from customers. New lander will take care of the weird wrapping issue.
April fool’s joke right?
nope, not a joke. We launched yesterday (holiday part on Fri delayed it a bit) witha test of the new template. You can check it out at cuisine.com. In addition to the branding changes we’ve also put the template onto a cloud platform for increased response time globally.
I think it’s pretty funny how the same domains have been trending on the homepage for 4+ years now. It would be nice if you guys put more effort into this site. I’ve experienced the same errors and bugs for years now and any reports I make fall on deaf ears.
That’s a lot of free exposure the same person who appears to own all 4 domains has gotten.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141114145049/http://www.afternic.com/
I Read your articles Everyday It’s Awesome keep it up
We have all heard this before nothing ever gets done. The platform is so patched up, I am amazed it is semi functional. Many of the domains listed at afternic are in wrong accounts.
Take fridges.com which sold at namejet last week for $20K, listed with a BIN for $10K at afternic. etc… I can give you thousands of examples.
It is like you are asking godaddy to put bidder id’s in auctions, which you would have to move heaven, and earth to do, but as long as the api bots keep bidding up 80% of the bidders, and the money keeps rolling in, look the other way 😉
Although GoDaddy is still my favourite registrar, I nevertheless find Sedo direct sales or offer pages the best and I use them with my own descriptions to sell my domains at Domains Feast via Twitter resulting in much increased traffic or interest!
So you forward your domain to their offer pages?
Yes, by using Bit.ly (Url Shortener) link after “Premium Domain” to Sedo offer pages in my Twitter tweets (@DomainsFeast).
I’d be curious if anyone is parking their domains by just forwarding them to the Sedo offer page.
I am only interested in selling not parking my domains but in any case I still need to list them first with Sedo before using their offer pages (my own descriptions are still allowed as well).. Again, I only list 1 or 2 domains for my Twitter tweets per working day rather than just too many domains listed at the same time for that usual for sale landers like Afternic or Efty which I am quite sure no one could be bothered to view! So I just feel it is good for both of me & Sedo & nothing else and I hope you will now understand. Thanks Bob
well as long as were in Godaddy 501 suggestions….
yes i agree if the Investor APP doesnt do everything, then i have to keep browser window open also, like for closeouts and buy it nows., can you keep watched closeouts on APP, or better yet have a toggle, INCLUDE CLOSEOUTS? for those that only want to watch biddable auctions.
but to beat a dead horse, Hi Paul and Joe
Please seperate the investor backorder market from the retail end user market and better EXPLAIN THAT AN OFFER COUNTER OFFER auction is really a listing…..
showing $12 names next to $4000 names in keyword searched makes people wonder what they are missing.
but hey thats just me
Innovation sure has been the victim in the Godaddy /Afternic merger, and the Sedo/Afternic Duopoly