Dan adds import-a-lead “lease to own” option

It’s a good option for lower-priced long-term payment deals.

At the Internet Commerce Association event in Las Vegas this January, someone asked GoDaddy President of Domains Paul Nicks if there could be an option to import a lead with a long-term payment plan.

Dan.com currently offers the ability to import a sale you negotiate elsewhere and Dan will handle the payment and transfer. It charges 5% for this, compared to the current 15% commission.

Nicks said he’d really like to, but the overhead of handling long-term payment options would make this problematic. (Long-term transactions require multiple inbound and outbound payments, as well as managing the nameservers for the domains.)

Today, Dan.com announced that you can import leads for payment plan domains, albeit at a higher 10% commission.

This makes sense for lower-value deals. For higher-priced domains, Escrow.com is probably a better bet. Escrow charges a $25/month fee plus its normal fee. For example, a $25,000 deal with monthly payments for two years at Escrow.com would cost $600 for the monthly fee and $214.50 for the escrow fee. This would cost $2,500 at Dan.

Dan also announced that all domains at Dan with a buy now price will be automatically opted into Afternic because the commission is the same if it sells there or at Dan. Prices will also be synched. This makes sense; the only hitch I can see is if you stop pointing a domain to Dan and it sells on Afternic. For example, you pointed it to Dan years ago and then decided to point it to Efty and forgot about the Dan listing. If you have “stale” listings, you might want to choose the option to opt-out.