Afternic marketplace: Two month update disappoints

A good 60 days into using the Afternic marketplace as a “forced” transition from the now defunct Dan.com, I’m about to present my personal experience and the results aren’t great.

The first 30 days looked promising, to be honest. After clocking two months I have one positive thing to say: The sheer amount of inquiries, as compared to Dan.com, is mind-boggling. You can thank the infamous “registrar path” for that.

While I had almost 50 inquiries that were dealt by GoDaddy brokers, I scored only one sale during the second month – and that domain was using Dan.com nameservers still. It’s a good indication that while such sales are “legitimate” and will only cost you 15% in fees, it’s advisable to ensure all your domains listed on Afternic use its ns1/ns2 pair of nameservers.

From a total of 46 inquiries, 3 were “confused” interactions that I can’t comment much on. A small percentage, perhaps 15 or so, were further negotiated by exchanging feedback with the GoDaddy brokers handling them. A handful came close to closing a deal on but the other party was adamant about maxing out their budget and I had no inclination to sell at these offered prices.

The majority of the inquiries stalled, with the brokers attempting several layers of communication but hearing nothing back. Several of these leads are now, a month later, being “pinged” by the brokers but I don’t have much hope anything will be achieved.

One crucial thing about GoDaddy/Afternic brokers is that there is inconsistency in their interactions with the seller, me. It seems that it’s a matter of personality and experience, along with adhering to wider communication principles. I like to ask questions and provide feedback and some responses were single words or affirmations of minimal eloquence. Some brokers were indeed detail-oriented and willing to expand on their process, which I appreciate. One provided their direct number without me asking for it!

Overall, it seems that GoDaddy’s Afternic is great for low value domains listed with a BIN, not a shocking discovery. The GoDaddy valuation tool that chokes around the $25,000 dollar mark does not help some buyers overcome the fact that domains can indeed be much more expensive than that. For the price range of under $5,000 dollars perhaps setting a BIN with no “make offer” option is the best way to sell outright. I would go as far as to define the sweet spot at $2,750 – $3,750 dollars based on what’s being shared daily on social media.

My single sale in the last 30 days took place with the buyer hitting the BIN button at $4,000 dollars. The transfer and payment took place smoothly and fast, despite the required transfer of the domain away from its registrar to GoDaddy.

As I don’t use Afternic’s boost I can’t comment on that. I have hopes about the proclaimed benefits of LTO listings and I do enable this option for some of my listed domains.

I think that Afternic did have back-end issues for a good two weeks during that 60 day window that have since been addressed. For that reason alone, I will give it another 30 days before I re-assess my domain selling strategy.