Here are four improvements GoDaddy should make for its aftermarket business.
GoDaddy continues to grow its aftermarket business. It has acquired massive portfolios and won exclusive partnerships with registrars to auction their expiring domain inventory.
That said, the company has many improvements to make. I often share feedback directly with companies but it always helps to nudge them a bit by writing about it. Companies have lots of things on their to-do list, so a little nudge might get some action.
Here are four things I think GoDaddy should do to improve its aftermarket experience.
Improve the For Sale Landers
It’s great that GoDaddy now allows domainers to use its Afternic for-sale landers. That said, these need improvement. This is low-hanging fruit and given that GoDaddy has a large portfolio of names to sell now, should boost both domainer sales and GoDaddy’s NameFind sale.
The first thing that’s wrong with the lander is its responsiveness. Once a domain goes past 11 or 12 characters the TLD gets pushed to two lines on a full laptop display. Here’s an example:
This makes your .com look like a .co.
The mobile experience also needs work. Here’s what this domain looks like on my iPhone:
Another thing that many people have asked for is GoDaddy branding on these landers. Even if it’s “Afternic Powered By GoDaddy” with the GoDaddy logo, this will instill trust in people that have never heard of Afternic before.
Delete domain names from within the app
GoDaddy’s Investor App is brilliant in its simplicity. I do all of my bidding from the app, not the site. One feature I’d really like is the ability to delete domains from your watch or bidding list in the app if you no longer want to bid on them.
Perhaps it’s because the domain has gotten too expensive or you just decide you no longer want to bid on it. Either way, the app can get very cluttered with domains. Since you can swipe right to bid, why not make it so you can swipe left to delete?
Bulk Watch capabilities
GoDaddy Auctions lets you bulk bid for domains. But many people prefer to watch domains rather than bid on them immediately so they don’t tip off other people about their bidding intentions.
You can do this by adding domains to the watch list, but this requires searching for each domain individually and clicking the watch icon. It would save lots of time if you could bulk watch domains, kind of like how you can bulk backorder domains on NameJet.
As for bulk bidding, this isn’t something I do often. I tried it last week and ran into lots of problems. I got many errors, and when I fixed them I still couldn’t submit the names.
Include the sale price on Afternic emails
Elliot Silver mentioned this the other day and I feel his pain. When you get an email from Afternic saying that your domain sold you then have to log into Afternic to see how much it sold for. It seems like it would be fairly easy to pull this data into the email.
Lots to do
I realize that Godaddy is devoting development resources to integrating Afternic into GoDaddy and many other aftermarket projects. But it seems like these shouldn’t require much work. If I were to vote for the top two, I’d say fixing the for sale landers and adding bulk watch capabilities. The landers should be very easy to fix.