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Efty launches new templates based on conversion data

by — Services 3 Comments

Company releases new landers based on years of conversion data.

Domain name sales platform Efty has launched three new themes that it hopes will lead to more domain inquiries and purchases for its clients.

“We reviewed inquiry data from the past four years on the Efty platform,” Efty co-founder Doron Vermaat explained. “We took the best performing colors, as well as placement of buttons and forms from our existing landing page themes, to create the new ones.”

Efty has 200,000 domains on its platform with over 3 million visitors per month.

Efty offers several landing page options including Make offer or Buy Now (or a combo of those two). It also has what it calls UDRP-safe and INDPR-safe landers with different sales messages.

The three new designs are called Fresku, Nubia and Nobo.

Here’s the Fresku lander with a Make Offer and Buy Now price:

This Nobo lander is interesting in that it has the buyer enter an offer price before proceeding to the form:

Efty lander

Efty adds live chat to marketplace

by — Services 3 Comments

Domain owners can chat with potential domain buyers in real time.

When someone wants to buy a domain name they want a quick response from the domain owner. The faster you respond, the better your chances of closing the sale.

Domain sales platform Efty is taking fast response to the next level by integrating Tawk.to live chat on users’ marketplace sites.

Live chat won’t appear on each individual domain name, but many Efty users forward their domain names to a landing page in the marketplace. If they do this, the landing page has SSL and can use the live chat feature.

Efty dashboard image

Efty users can forward their domains to their marketplace URLs, which have live chat.

Tawk.to also lets domain owners monitor visitor behavior on their sites.

Efty also announced an integration with Mailchimp.

Efty adds SSL to marketplaces

by — Domain Parking 0 Comments

Marketplaces can now be secured with SSL, opening up the option to have secure landing pages.

Domain name landing page service Efty has added an SSL option for marketplaces.

Customers who park their domains with Efty landers and have a marketplace for their domains can add an SSL to the marketplace. Here’s an example of an Efty-powered marketplace.

This is important because the most popular browsers (including Chrome) now alert users if they are entering information in a form field on a site that is not secured with SSL.

Bringing SSL to individual domain name landers is a bit more complicated. It could be done with free certificates from Let’s Encrypt but some engineering would be involved.

Domain landing page services tend to get around this by hosting the form on a main domain name. For example, when a user submits an inquiry on a domain at Uniregistry, they are forwarded to a contact form on Uniregistry.com.

With the new SSL feature at Efty, the company also introduced an option to forward your domain names to the corresponding page on your marketplace. If you add SSL to your marketplace and activate the forwarding feature, your domain landers with forms will now resolve to a secure page.

Domain inquiries could drop next month. Blame SSL.

by — Domain Parking 25 Comments

Start filling out a form on for sale landers and you’ll see a “not secure” message.

Yesterday I wrote about how landing page companies are adding SSL support for domains on their platforms in order to meet Google’s deadline next month. Starting next month, domain names with any sort of user submission form that don’t have an SSL certificate will be marked as “not secure” in Google Chrome when people enter text in the form.

This is also going to be an issue for domain name for sale pages that have a contact form. A “not secure” message in the browser will surely lead to some drop in conversions. The message will only appear when someone starts typing in the form, but that will probably catch their eye. It would be much better to have the green secure padlock.

You might say “Hey, if they really want the domain, they’ll find a way to contact me”. But domain sales companies have worked tirelessly to improve the conversion rate of their sales forms, so dismissing this issue out of hand doesn’t make sense.

Most of my domains are parked with Afternic and Uniregistry, and both of these should be OK.

Afternic parked pages don’t have a form on the landing page. Instead, like many parking companies, they include a banner with a link to a form on a secure site.

Uniregistry is the same for standard parked pages. If you choose the sales form option, the domain forwards to a page on Uniregistry.com that has SSL. For example, go to Sweller.com and you’ll be forwarded to Uniregistry.com.

I also have a few domains at BrandBucket. These have a contact form and will be marked as “not secure” starting next month if someone starts typing inside the form. Ditto for domains at Efty.

SSL certificates can be obtained for free, so there’s a solution for these companies that will not require shelling out lots of money on SSL certs. However, it’s going to require some technical work to make this happen. I recommend domain sales companies get working on this. Fast.

Accepting PayPal for domains makes sense but there are risks

by — Services 9 Comments

There’s no seller protection for domains but it makes the buyer more comfortable.

I saw that Efty has added the option to accept PayPal payments for domain names listed on its platform. I can see how this could boost sales; PayPal is trusted and much more recognizable to the general population than an escrow service like Escrow.com and Payoneer.

In a blog post, Efty wrote:

At Efty we do recommend using a licensed escrow integration partner such as Escrow.com or Payoneer Escrow for higher priced domain names but we also understand there are benefits of adding PayPal buy-it-now buttons for your lower priced inventory such as receiving instant payment for your domain name and allowing buyers to pay for your domain name in a matter of seconds instead of going trough the often longer, escrow process.

I agree with this.

Keep in mind that PayPal protects buyers of intangible goods like domain names but not sellers. So you’re taking some risk when you sell a domain with PayPal. Click here to continue reading…