There are now lots of good options for selling your domain names through landing pages.
I’m getting optimistic about upstarts shaking up the business of selling domains.
GoDaddy currently dominates the domain name aftermarket. That won’t change; it has the power of both buyers and sellers in the market. If you’re selling your domains, you need to use GoDaddy. There’s also Sedo in a distant second. It’s a good company, moves some good domains (especially outside the U.S.), but doesn’t have the distribution that GoDaddy has. Sedo plays a vital role in the industry as the #2 by keeping GoDaddy honest and on its toes.
Both of these companies have built a market. Building a market is hard to do. Don’t gripe when they take 20% off the top of your domain sales. They deserve it for bringing buyers. (It’s fair to gripe about them for other things, though. GoDaddy’s domain listing system is borked, Sedo’s UI still needs updating. We need to keep these companies on their toes.)
It will be very difficult for any other company to come in at this point and create a true market of buyers and sellers. But there are some upstarts that are innovating in ways that will help domain investors.
Right now, there are two main ways your domains sell. One is that someone buys them through a marketplace or their registrar distribution network. The other is that someone visits your domain and buys it through whatever service you connect your landers to.
Uniregistry was doing some cool things with landers. Specifically, you could negotiate your own sales or send a lead to Uniregistry’s brokers. You can still negotiate on your own, but I’m disappointed that you no longer have full visibility into what Uni’s brokers are doing when you send your leads to them. And I wouldn’t bet on free self-brokering being around forever now that GoDaddy owns it.
What makes me optimistic is what smaller companies are doing.
First up is DAN.com. It has innovated in domain financing and payments. I’ve talked to several large domain investors who are doing a bang-up business selling domains on payment plans. Most people who buy domains on plans end up making all of the payments. Those that don’t tie up the domains for a short while, but the domain seller gets to keep the cash and the domain. I also like how DAN.com makes payments so easy for buyers. This is very important.
The other is SquadHelp. More than any other company, I think it is using data to iterate. Its new white label marketplace option has two things that I believe can significantly help domain sellers: remarketing to landing page visitors and 24/7 chat/phone support on landers. A lot is going on under the hood, which CEO Darpan Munjal explains on this week’s podcast.
Other small companies are doing their share, too. Efty has a different business model (pay as a SaaS service, no commissions) and DomainAgents brings both distribution and paid inquiries.
The net-net is that there are now lots of innovative options for selling domains through your landers. These service providers will never replicate the reach of the major marketplaces, but they can help you seamlessly sell your domains.
I’m glad DAN.com is offering monthly payment options. More marketplaces should begin doing that. Although I haven’t used their service, I imagine they’re doing a good job.
In fairness, other companies began offering such options to domain owners many years prior to DAN.com. For example, when I began work at Epik in 2017, monthly financing and leasing were already a highlighted feature in the Epik marketplace; and many domain owners as well as buyers / renters were using it.
Indeed, that was 1 of the primary reasons I joined the company – because I saw monthly payment plans as a way to redefine the way domains are bought and sold. I wanted to upgrade that existing feature, which was already innovative. Beyond that, I had plans to extend that functionality to unregistered domains as well – premium-tier nTLDs in particular. The ambition was to steer the registry / registrar business as a whole to a monthly subscription model rather than a yearly renewal model. I pitched that strategy to most of the bigger nTLD registry operators and was met with some interest. However, circumstances
When I joined Epik back in early 2017, DAN.com (formerly known as Undeveloped) had just been acquired by Epik; and we were actively discussing merging the 2 domain marketplaces. Undeveloped / DAN did not have any monthly payment functionality back then, whereas Epik did. My original recommendation was to retire the Epik marketplace and substitute Undeveloped (now DAN) – but to incorporate Epik’s financing / leasing tools within Undeveloped.
Unfortunately, the 2 companies split up. Without Undeveloped / DAN on board, I shifted my attention to modernizing the Epik marketplace, which was comparatively limited and outdated aside from this crucial innovative feature. Many updates remained unfinished when I left the company in early 2019. Some of it (I’m pleased to see) has continued since. But one thing we definitely accomplished during 2017 and 2018 was to build the most advanced and customizable tools for leasing / financing / optioning in the domain market. I doubt anybody has replicated that since. Objectively, I mean, the Epik tools have a wider range of customization than anything else I’ve seen.
Really, it doesn’t matter who began leasing / financing first. What matters is that someone – and ideally multiple companies – promote the idea and find a wide audience of domain owners plus buyers / renters who will use those transactions. Monthly payment plans are an obvious idea for any expensive item, not only domains. And it’s surely inevitable that many companies will implement leasing / financing features. Everybody copies existing ideas, which is not only ok … it’s laudable. Epik wasn’t the only company to begin leasing / financing domains years ago. HugeDomains has offered a 12-month financing plan prominently on its website for ages, although of course HugeDomains isn’t open to ordinary sellers.
Still, it rankles a bit to see the word “innovated” applied to domain financing / leasing in 2020 – especially coming from a knowledgeable domain industry journalist like Andrew Allemann. This concept was innovative 5+ years ago. By now, the mystery is why the domain industry has taken so long to acknowledge and adopt this idea. Compared to other industries, which have used financing / leasing since time immemorial, the domain industry is downright backward!
I suppose this bugs me because I spent so much time overseeing the development of Epik’s monthly payment plan feature years ago only to see it largely ignored by news sites like this one, in spite of my own years-long connection to DNW as a writer. If we had received positive coverage, then I might have been more successful at convincing my boss to allocate resources to continued innovation in that area. As things happened, we didn’t get as far as I wanted. And other business strategies took priority at Epik by the time I left the company.
To be clear, leasing / financing is not my brainchild. One of my former colleagues (who likes to remain anonymous) had begun upgrading the existing feature when I joined the Epik. And the feature existed in the first place because Rob Monster wanted it clear back in 2013. Multiple lease transactions were already underway at Epik in 2014. Let that date sink in, please, before calling this feature “innovative” in 2020.
Yes, I understand that many people object to Epik / Rob Monster because of its / his connections with controversial politics. But that began about 12 – 18 months ago. I’m also willing to admit that Epik’s innovation in the area of domain leasing / financing went largely unnoticed because it was buried in a relatively small marketplace internal to the registrar itself, which didn’t look as slick as big competitors like Uniregistry. And it wasn’t marketed very heavily.
Nevertheless, I do wonder what might have been. My sense of things is that many features at Epik were genuinely innovative – especially at the time they launched. Yet they didn’t get much attention, and so they languished in obscurity. Not only monthly payment plans but also branded seller marketplaces for individual customers – something that was later done much better by Efty but which Epik had begun doing years before for free. It wasn’t monetized, which caused it to seem like a drag rather than a viable business model; and so the feature wasn’t updated regularly and slipped behind the times. But what would have happened if blogs like DNW had taken note of such features years ago with words like “innovative”? Perhaps those features would have been accentuated.
Well, I’m rambling. In any event, I stopped working for Epik more than a year ago. None of this is meant as a criticism of DAN.com. I’m encouraged by seeing them not only offer monthly financing but also promote it. I just wish the domain industry would reserve the word “innovative” for something that’s genuinely new. Mainly this industry is backward, and we shouldn’t stop pointing out how slow it is to really implement and support and adopt genuine innovations.
Good artile as always. I used godaddy for a while. Had good sales and inquiries for a while. Then came the current marketplace. Pretty bad. Half the time it says domain ownership verification failed. But the domain its self is registered with godaddy so I don’t know how verification could fail. Oh you don’t even get an email to tell you about listing problems. then I moved on to dan for a good portion of my domains. Sales and inquiries tanked. Like a LOT. Now i am thinking of “If you’re selling your domains, you need to use GoDaddy”
“Most people who buy domains on plans end up making all of the payments.”
I like seeing the innovation too, but can we see the data this statement is based on? It doesn’t match up with my experience for DAN payment plans greater than 12 months. (Over 50% do finish paying for 12 months or less). I’m on track for a large majority of 36 month plans to default. Would love to see actual data from DAN.
Would be nice seeing Dan’s data. I’m basing this on discussions with investors including one very large one. They do say, however, that the longer the payment terms, the more likely the default.
A default is ok because then it is just a straightforward lease for X months and the domain name is returned to the owner. Then, the owner can sell it or lease it to the next buyer or lessee. Just like any other commercial real estate property.
Some portion of those defaulting would have paid in full upfront if installments were not an option. Taking that important point into account, it’s not known at this point if allowing installments increases or decreases net revenue to sellers. We need a lot more data to decide that point, but anecdotally with my portfolio it appears that allowing installments > 12 months is a net loser vs no installments allowed.
Sort of new, so please excuse the stupid question. When you say “sell at Go Daddy”, do you mean Afternic? Go Daddy does own that don’t they?
Yes. GoDaddy owns Afternic. You can list via Afternic or GoDaddy.
Agree that finally innovation is coming to Domain space.
I just set up our 2nd marketplace using SquadHelp’s whitelabel program in last couple of hours at:
ChampionDomains.com
Site/database still coming together but already looks pretty impressive. SH support was quick, adding 25k domains was a breeze. Also changing DNS to SH landers. I also noticed that the search function brings related domains up also; if you search logistics, it will also bring trucking, transport, etc in results….awesome.
Very excited about this new innovation in domaining space, SH support also said they have a lot of further updates coming…
Already have DAN marketplace at DomainBoss.com
Good time to be in domaining biz guys 🙂
I have been using custom landing pages for years at domain-buy-sell.com and domainiz.com and sold lots of high price domain names.
You sound like a very special not.
Very special boy I meant.
with the same portfolio, in Dan I have 5/12 monthly visits per domain. In sedo I have an average 300/500 monthly visits per domain.
How is it possible, that difference between one and the other??
That is not true. Afternic and godaddy have no selling powers, they are only middlemen who don’t know how to properly negotiate price. This is why more people go to sedo than afternic.
I am just a guy who sells lots of domains sometimes, then 3 or 4 weeks will pass before the selling starts again.