Here are three lessons to sell more domains.
I’ve made three small (one very small!) domain sales over the past 10 days, and each of them comes with a lesson. Here they are:
The follow-up
Some sales discussions go stale. It makes sense to follow up from time-to-time on previous negotiations to see if the buyers are still interested. Last week I rekindled five prior negotiations at Uniregistry. So far, I’ve closed one.
The first sale was for a domain I picked up on GoDaddy closeouts six months ago. I hadn’t received any inquiries on the domain since the last person inquired, and the domain had a buy now price of $1,500. The buyer was still interested but at the lower level. The domain doesn’t have a lot of commercial value. It might have sold for the buy now price eventually, but a bird in the hand…buy, sell, rinse and repeat. I sold it for $820.
Lesson: follow up with stale sales leads.
The expiring domain
On Domain Name Wire Podcast #260, Richard Lau and James Morfopoulos gave an excellent tip for domains you’re about to let go: list them on Afternic for $59 or $79.
I look through my domains 3-6 months in advance and turn off auto-renew if I don’t plan to renew them. James’ tip was to lower the buy now price on Afternic to increase the chances of a sale for domains you’re letting go. I dropped the price to $59.
This is a domain I had owned for over 10 years and received zero inquiries on. It was going to the waste bin and I was going to receive $0 for it when it expired two weeks from now. Instead, I got $44 after commission.
That’s infinitely more than I was going to receive.
Lesson: as part of your process of turning off auto-renew, lower the sales price on Afternic for one last chance at a sale.
The quick sale
The final sale was for a domain I bought on GoDaddy a couple of weeks ago for a nominal amount. It sold on Afternic about a week later for $3,300.
It’s likely that the buyer had been interested in the domain but didn’t know how to acquire it when it expired. When they saw the buy now option, they jumped on it.
Lesson: immediately list your domains for sale on Aftenric after acquiring them.
Thanks Andrew: Where is the best place to sell portfolios of related domains? Is Is it better to sell them individually ? Would prefer to sell them as a group. How do you get a spot on the banner on the Name jet page?
Portfolios might do best on NamePros. I don’t know how the NameJet banners work, but I think their high-volume sellers get them.
As a buyer I like DNWE a lot but wish they had more quality .com inventory to work with.
Quite insightful. Thanks, Andrew.
I bought a domain from GoDaddy through G Suite and when I decided to move the domain registration to another company, I discovered that the login details provided by G Suite for my GoDaddy account didn’t work. Tried contacting G suite and GoDaddy several times but the solutions I got from their call centers didn’t work.
The domain registration expired in March, how do I get the domain back?
Glad that was a helpful tip Andrew. Thanks again for having us!
You’re welcome on the show again any time!
Hi Andrew; this a great post; very informative and insightful. Actually it immediately sparked off some ideas in my mind which I plan to implement. Thank you, Sajid
Great, I’m glad it was helpful.
This is great! 3 powerful lessons that will help every domainer.