No Negotiation Box with GoDaddy Offers

Afternic recently began offering Dan.com-lookalike landing pages with GoDaddy branding. I liked them enough to move inventory to them away from Dan.com. Afternic followed this up with the ability to allow prospects to make an offer to buy a domain name in addition to the BIN and LTO options.

Unlike how the Make Offer process works on Dan.com, there is no negotiation box for sellers to communicate with buyers directly. Instead, when a buyer submits an offer via the landing page, the negotiation is handled by a GoDaddy broker.

I am pretty sure the GoDaddy broker will use the BIN along with the floor and minimum price levels to negotiate a deal on behalf of the seller. If there is not a floor price – the bottom line price the seller has set in order to part with a domain name – I believe the broker will get in touch with the seller to try and bridge the gap between what the buyer is offering and what the seller is seeking. I also believe if the seller has a floor price listed, the broker is authorized to close a deal at that level. I believe when domain names are listed for sale on Afternic, the broker’s duty is to represent the seller’s interests.

Domain name sellers are able to see their inbound offers in the Lead Center, which is located under the Sales tab on the left side of the Afternic dashboard.

Not having the negotiation box for the buyer and seller to discuss a domain name sale is good and bad. It’s bad because I have always enjoyed the back and forth banter of a negotiation. It’s good because I have probably gotten in the way of quite a few sales that may have been able to be closed by a professional negotiator who doesn’t a personal connection to the domain name itself.

For the time being, I am only using the Make Offer option for a very small fraction of my domain names listed for sale via Afternic. Most of those do not have floor prices listed.