Andrew Allemann 30 Comments
Better lead follow up is worth the commission.
Domainers tend to gripe about paying commissions to marketplaces, especially when the lead was generated from a link on their own parking page.
This makes sense. If you, the domainer, generated the lead, why should you pay a marketplace a fat commission?
I think there are two ways that marketplaces can “earn” their commission:
1. The marketplace generates the lead. This can either be from someone searching on the marketplace for a domain, or (more likely) from distributing the listings to registrars. This is a high value for domain name sellers.
2. They do a better job handling the lead than you would. In this case, it means a faster response (preferably by phone) than you can provide as well as better follow up.
I received an email marketing pitch from Afternic today that smartly addresses the second value add. It proposes that domainers put a for sale link on their parking pages that leads to Afternic, and Afternic promises:
I know we’ve all used domain sales services that do little more than send the same email you would have sent to the prospect. I think Afternic’s pitch is solid. If the company consistently contacts leads that often and by phone, it’s worth the commission.
That’s not to mention getting into its registrar distribution network.
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About Andrew Allemann
Andrew Allemann has been registering domains for over 25 years and publishing Domain Name Wire since 2005. He has been quoted about his expertise in domain names by The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and NPR. Connect with Andrew: LinkedIn - Twitter/X - Facebook
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Comments
Joseph Peterson saysIn my experience, Afternic sales staff do a pretty good job. Fast follow-up. And they pick up the phone to negotiate with buyers while I’m busy or asleep.
Uniregistry / DomainNameSales works mainly with clunky email templates. I’ve had complaints from potential buyers who kept getting spammy follow-up emails. Even months after I was banned from the market place, their staff kept sending formulaic follow ups – something I had actually opted OUT of when I was a customer. For buyers, this is often a big turnoff. And I’m sure it has cost me sales.
Sedo, meanwhile, doesn’t interact with leads. I wish they did. And I also wish their platform permitted us to follow up in some way. Sometimes a seller’s asking price changes months after the original negotiation ended. So the new price might be within a sellers budget; yet there is no mechanism for reaching out to tell the buyer. Setting a lower BIN price might alert them. But a seller may still prefer to negotiate rather than set a fixed price. Sedo sales staff could add a much-needed human element by inviting potential buyers to return to the table.
Both Uniregistry and Sedo could learn a thing or two from Afternic.
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- Paul Nicks says
Very kind response Joseph, thank you for being a customer.
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- Aaron Strong says
Joseph – You often mention you were banned from Uniregistry/DNS. That type of hostility sounds very troubling, something that seems to plague the domain industry in all corners. Hostility as such deters new domain investors and inhibits the base of participants…..Has anyone reached out to you to fix the rift, an olive branch or anything?
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- Ryan says
DNS/Uniregistry needs to focus on what it does, and not outbidding customers/clients at other auction platforms.
I don’t think many domainers realize the purchases they make, and the profit generated kind of works against them.
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- Joseph Peterson says
@Aaron Strong,
Yes, many of the execs at Uniregistry have done their utmost to convince me to try the registrar. They seem trustworthy, competent, professional, etc. So I have quite a favorable impression of the company except for management at DomainNameSales. One exec even complained about the VP who banned me and asked me to talk to Frank Schilling about the issue.
Frank is a nice enough guy. Personally I like him even if his agenda isn’t mine. He listened to my viewpoint at NamesCon, but his advice was literally to “turn the other cheek” – which implies I’d get slapped again!
See AlsoCentral Plus Finance review 2023 | File A Scam complaintHow I Started A $500K/Month Real Estate Investment Business - Starter StoryThere’s only 1 company in this industry where the management has actively interfered with my business and made threats. That’s Uniregistry. Honestly, I don’t see how I could rationally entrust my portfolio to such a company. It isn’t that the other execs haven’t tried to woo me. Just a case of “once bitten, twice shy”.
Most customers will have a better experience at Uniregistry than I did, of course. A few will be coerced and sabotaged, but even I recognize that only happens in a minority of cases.
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- Bill says
Joseph, You’re not alone. Most even haven’t figured out how far the Uniregistry companies reach into your business. But some of us have! You obviously did. It’s a rare person who dares to speak up against Frank Schilling publically even if they figure out the game. Good for you!
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- Mason says
My parking revenue is down about 30 percent since DNS shifted to uniregistry it is not random, did the house up the juice for themselves, anyone else notice this???
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- Paul K says
I believe its called Sales Acceleration Program.
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- Paul Nicks says
@Paul K – you are correct, sales acceleration is an offering we have at Afternic that we have seen dramatically increase revenue for our customers who have tried it.
You can learn more here: https://www.afternic.com/sales-acceleration
@Andrew, if you decide to try the program out I’d love to hear about your personal results
-Paul
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- Andrew Allemann says
Hi Paul, so to use the program you just point your domains that are listed at Afternic to Afternic parking pages? Or do you need to “sign up”?
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- Koosah says
A major problem with afternic is that its website is just stupid.. you sell domains but I cant search for them ? By length ? By category ? By age.. makes no sense to me!
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- Paul Nicks says
Hey Koosah, I’ll try to make some sense of it for you.
We spend a majority of our time and resources on the sales channels that generate the most end-user engagement. A vast majority of all sales are driven either through our registrar partnerships, where we put your inventory directly on the sales path of 8 out of the top 10 global registrars, or from inbound links on domain landing pages.
To focus engineering effort on optimizing the Afternic.com website for businesses searching our inventory would provide very little return for our customers vs continuing to optimize our better performing channels.
If you are looking for inventory on a wholesale basis, then I would suggest GoDaddy Auctions which does provide many advanced search features available that are geared towards investors (age, length, etc).
Would love to discuss further, you can reach me at Paul @ Godaddy
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- koosah says
Another issue:
Why does it take weeks/months to receive the DLS email from Godaddy ? Really doesnt make sense!Loading...
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- Ryan says
Uniregistry conflicts me when brokers can’t get a deal done, they try to offer the potential buyer that you lead there a gtld, or a cheaper priced name. I hate this practice.
Afternic is neutral, there business is to sell domain names, simple as that.
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- todd says
“Every lead is contacted at least 4 times in the first 48 hours”
Am I the only one that thinks this seems a little desperate? Four times in two days seems overkill and I would think would push off the buyer. Maybe I’m wrong and would love to hear other opinions on this.
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- Andrew Allemann says
I don’t think it’s overkill. I imagine this is a combination of email and phone. So when the lead is submitted they get an email, then a phone call follow up, then more communication the next day. (Not sure if this is the exact order, but you know what I mean.)
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- gTLD says
Todd, Purchasing a domain is an impulse buy. Calling / Emailing a lead 10x in the first 48 hours wouldn’t even be overkill. (I’m being facetious).
Biggest thing the statement doesn’t cover is when their sale reps make contact with the buyer, they then follow up accordingly. They don’t just keep calling 3 more times for the hell of it.
The 4 times within the first 48 hours is to just make contact with the buyer. 🙂
Many times after the 48 hour window if you reach the customer their response will be “oh, we purchased another name already, sorry”.
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- Joseph Peterson says
@todd,
Many buyers are looking to purchase a domain right away. If they don’t get a response quickly, they’ll frequently buy something else. Or at least, they’ll expand their search and fall out of love with the domain they first inquired about. Strike while the iron is hot!
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- todd says
@JP @Andrew
Thanks for the reply. I do agree to strike when the iron is hot but 4 replies in 2 days still looks desperate to me. Some say don’t reply for at least a week or they will come back with a low ball offer and some say to reply right away. I guess I’ll be testing both ways now.
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- Joseph Peterson says
Much of the “common wisdom” about how to handle inbound buyer interest is little more than domainer fantasy.
It’s a rare buyer who’s fixated on 1 specific domain, who can’t think of any alternatives, and who’s patient / masoch*stic enough to keep returning week after week while the owner is completely ignoring him!
Most buyers are acting on impulse, or else they’re pragmatists. They want to find a name for their project within a day or two and not waste too much time. If 1 owner ignores them and another gives them a price quote right away, whom are they more likely to buy from?
Imagine if car dealerships or real estate agents dealt with potential customers the way domainers advise. You call up the realtor and get ignored for a week straight. So you find another realtor. Or you walk into a car dealership saying “Hello? Anybody in?” But you only hear your own echoes.
Is that the way buyers like to buy things? Is that how stuff sells? Use common sense and ignore domainer gossip.
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- Andrew Allemann says
Todd, who is telling you to wait a week? It’s a very rare domain for which that could possibly make sense.
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- Joseph Peterson says
P.S. Since Afternic is listening, I do wish they would allow .IN listings. Recently an Afternic broker came to me with a $1500 offer on 1 of my .IN domains; but the domain couldn’t actually be listed on the website, and the sale fell through.
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- Paul Nicks says
I’ll bring that to the product team, thanks.
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- A Mitchell says
Could commission rates be given too much importance compared to key performance indicators such as sales volumes and market reach? If a seller’s sales volumes double in a year, would a commission rate of 25-30% appear unreasonable or even noticeable?
Secondary marketplaces are key players in an ecosystem that could benefit from strengthening. Sales commissions contribute to that ecosystem. Even if a marketplace is simply processing a sales lead that came in from a landing page, the marketplace is contributing its commercial reputation and transaction mechanisms to make that sale successful.
Some sales bog down and require time-and-effort by marketplace staff, whereas other transactions occur with little human involvement. A healthy commission structure ensures that humans are available to step in when needed.
More important than commission rates is the functionality and usability of the three major secondary marketplaces for domains. All three lag behind other types of marketplaces in terms of QA and W3C compliance standards for usability. It is as if usability standards are being ignored.
The pre-release testing that occurs in the game industry, where every happy path is explored in excruciating detail, is notable in the domain industry only for its absence. eNom and Afternic reject the concept of a happy path in favor of culs-de-sac.
You should all be using VPNs all the time, yet Uniregistry blocks visitors to its marketplace landing pages when the visitors use certain VPN addresses. Millions of potential buyers from China can only hope to reach most of the new TLDs with help from VPNs because most of new TLDs are not approved to pass through the Great Firewall.
GoDaddy, for its part, blocks off its homepage when certain VPN IP addresses are used. These and a plethora of other inconveniences and sales “stoppers” can and should be resolved through a healthier, more professionalized ecosystem, which a fair and reasonable commission structure will support.
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- Jackie says
I am a fan of the afternic platform, and have learned to deal with most of its idiosyncrasies. What really frustrated me is the inability to get any useful info from parking data. Even just implementing simple column searching would go a long way towards making it usable. Without that, I am hard pressed to keep my parking at Afternic.
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- Karl says
When I look at any DNS sales lists, afternic is hardly ever on the list. It is always Namejet, Sedo… and some Godaddy… and for .io names is is park.io. I have most of my domains listed at afternic because of their network, but am starting to move some to Sedo and other places. They do have great customer support though.
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- Andrew Allemann says
Afternic no longer discloses their sales. I wish they’d start doing that again, at least at a high level.
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- Jackie says
Are they included in GoDaddy sales reports?
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- Andrew Allemann says
What GoDaddy sales reports? I don’t think they publish reports anymore.
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- Joseph Peterson says
GoDaddy / Afternic stopped reporting sales in December 2014, nearly 2 years ago:
https://domainnamewire.com/2014/12/24/v-v-v-voom-and-not-much-else-expired-domain-report/
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