More sales are good but recent integrations might cause headaches.
GoDaddy made a couple of recent changes that could push more inventory to its distributed Afternic network. More inventory is good, but I worry that the new inventory will include a higher-than-normal rate of invalid listings.
First, GoDaddy created a tool to move marketplace domains from Uni, which is shutting down, to Afternic. This can be helpful if you regularly list domains at Uni and not at Afternic.
Second, the company automatically syndicated domains listed on Dan that have a buy now price to the Afternic network.
The challenge I see with these integrations is that Uni and Dan likely have many stale listings. Unlike Afternic, Uni and Dan are not marketplaces. They are landing page services in which people visit a domain and then have the option to buy it. (Technically, people could search Uni and Dan inventory, but I doubt many people ever did that.)
Because domains not parked with Uni and Dan would never sell, most domainers didn’t bother to delete domains from these platforms if they no longer wished to sell them there. Perhaps they sold the domain at Sedo and never removed the Dan listing. Or the domains they had on Uniregistry Market expired, and they didn’t bother to delete them.
The Uni migration was opt-in, but there was no going back once you clicked the migration button. I clicked the button thinking I’d get some sort of confirmation about what would happen but didn’t. It was too late.
The Dan migration is opt-out, meaning that if your domains are at Dan with buy now prices, they will be syndicated to Afternic unless you opt out.
This past week, I spent a few hours finding and removing over 100 invalid listings from my Afternic account. Most of these were added through the Uni migration. I opted out of Dan syndication because I already list all of those domains on Afternic.
So while I think it’s great that domains are getting more views through Afternic, I worry there will be more invalid listings. This creates a bad experience for buyers. It is also annoying when domain investors try to list their newly-acquired domains on Afternic, only to find they are already listed by someone else who no longer owns them.
Another glitch I noticed in the auto-sync between Dan and Afternic is minimum offer not transferring over with BIN listing.
For example, I have a domain listed on Dan.com for $25K BIN, but it was auto-synched with Afternic. The $25K BIN is listed, but the minimum is listed as $25K too.
Whereas, on Dan.com this listing is $25K BIN, $10K minimum for more flexible pricing.
This minimum sync issue needs to be fixed as well.
“This creates a bad experience for buyers. It is also annoying when domain investors try to list their newly-acquired domains on Afternic, only to find they are already listed by someone else who no longer owns them.”
Ownership verification has been widely requested by domainers. The good news is that this is being worked on, and I’ll provide more updates when I can.
Thank you James for the update!
Selling and getting paid for names that you no longer own, not to mention someone else selling and getting paid for names that you do own, is insane. (I had both). It’s so effed up that I will soon pass on the GD ecosystem forever. No way to win me back if they opt to ignore basic function and keep this dysfunctional disaster. They keep blaming sellers for what the system should have been able to do 15 years ago.
Easiest solution… just completely remove Dan and uni from the internet and all the domains will be at the monopolistic afternic which has the worst dashboard
From good to the worst peephole
I have left DAN and everything is in Afternic.com is the best way after so many changes.
ok… this is a bit of a mess. It requires a lot of work to compare the list at the Uni market compared to the list of names that are registered at Uni or elsewhere. Yes, it should have been cleaned out during the years, but it had value in keeping it as you could see all kind of info relevant to it.
So I think
1. I will just have it all migrated to Afternic market even if it includes expired names.
2. Regarding names at Uni registrar- I assume the transfer will take place to Godaddy in the near future?
3. Names that need specific keywords to be used in landing pages. Those will need to be manually adjusted.
Did I miss anything?
I have doubts about whether Godaddy can bear the same prices (Com) that UNI has as a domain registrar, renewals, transfers. I would like to know more, the answers I receive are evasive.