Buyers and sellers will be able to negotiate who pays commissions.
The Spaceship SellerHub domain sales platform is changing its commissions.
Yesterday, the platform tested charging buyers a 5% commission on top of the 5% sellers pay.
Today, it has rolled back that change, but is changing the overall commission to 10%, double what it was before this week.
Commenting on X, Namecheap founder and Chief of Strategy & Innovation for the company (which owns Spaceship) Richard Kirkendall, said the 5% buyer commission was a short-run test yesterday. He said it didn’t noticeably impact sales, but the company is rolling it back anyway.
While the overall commission is increasing, buyers and sellers can negotiate who pays.
Checkout and self-serve links will continue to charge a 5% commission.
This honestly tilts the economics pretty heavily in Afternic’s favor because of the lander penalty.
Let’s say I sell 10 domains a year at $2000 each.
If I point everything to SS landers and end up with 4 sales from direct lander visits and 6 through Afternic, here’s what happens:
4 × $2,000 at 10% = $800
6 × $2,000 at 25% = $3,000
So now I’ve paid $3,800 in commission.
But if I had just listed everything at Afternic and those same 6 sales happened there at 15%, I’d pay:
6 × $2,000 × 15% = $3,000
That’s $800 less.
So where’s the upside? I don’t really see an incentive to point names to SS landers unless SS is driving way more sales than Afternic = which, realistically, is unlikely.
Afternic intentionally structured the commission penalty such that the economics wouldn’t make sense to land somewhere else even if that place had 0% commission.
At 5% it was already a slightly losing proposition, but some people were willing to eat a small loss just to “stick it to the man”. At 10% commission you will lose substantially as you demonstrated with a reasonable example.
I’m guessing this is just Spaceship acknowledging that they’ve lost the battle to be the lander of choice, so they might as well make more money on their network sales.
May be GoDaddy’s business practice is contagious.
“Buyers and sellers will be able to negotiate who pays commissions.”
Don’t you just love the spin that’s put onto it?
Or how about this: “10% of the sales price will now be taken as commission, up from 5%.”
Which one sounds better?
No difference, just clever marketing. IMO…
Because of course they did…
IT’S LIKE I SAID IN September – “PRIVATE EQUITY”
https://domainnamewire.com/2025/09/12/private-equity-firm-is-buying-namecheap-in-deal-that-values-company-at-1-5-billion/#comment-2281941
Good bye spaceship
Imo, its reasonable when Spaceship charge additional commission
They offer speed, quick respond and simple services. Thank you