Would you like people to pay to make an offer on your name? Would you like to pay to make an offer on someone else’s domain name?
I read a tweet from George Kirikos about low ballers (someone offered him $500 for Orderly.com)
George wrote:
What sucks is the time wasters trying to buy domains at 1% of the floor price, spamming their lowball offers. I think Webmagic has it right, charging people $20 to contact them. webmagic.com/domains/domain… I’m surprised @eftycom hasn’t copied that feature yet. @MichaelCygerRead
For those of you not familiar with Web Magic they have been around since the beginning of the commercial Internet. They are the people behind Toys.com and Pets.com. Their founder Greg McLemore has been quoted and featured in many mainstream publications.
Web Magic has one of the more involved contact forms, it’s not the boiler plate you find on most landing pages, Hi I’m Bob, Example.com $1,000 thank you. NO!
There is also some legalese that goes with the contact form.
Then there is this:
Submission Fee: After successfully completing the Domain and Advertising Proposal Submission Form, you will be redirected to PayPal in order to process a required, non-refundable Proposal Submittal Fee ($20 if related to a .com purchase or joint venture offer, $10 otherwise). Payment on the PayPal site may be made via bank account or credit card. You do not have to sign up for a PayPal account to complete this transaction. Forms submitted without paying the Form Submission Fee will not be reviewed, and if you wish to pay at a later time, you will have to fill out the form again. Once you pay a Proposal Fee, future communications regarding that domain do not require the fee (and do not go through this form).
Web Magic is not the only player out there doing this, I have written before about Nat Cohen doing this as well.
When you go to Nat’s company website Telepathy.com you see this when you click inquiries:
To enable efficient responses to domain name inquiries, all inquiries regarding Telepathy’s domain names are handled through SecuredOffers.com.
Keith over at Namepros took umbrage with Mr. Cohen’s policy.
I’m sorry but not a chance I’ll ever pay $19 in order to negotiate on a domain. This is a clear money grab. You get bombarded with emails? Set up an automated system to field offers and go from there. This is the kind of sh*t that gives the domain industry a black eye!
The post has over 6 pages of comments and close to 12,000 views.
So would you like Efty to give you the ability to offer an inquiry fee? What about DAN or any other marketplace?
Of course currently you can use DomainAgents.com
The cheapos over at namepros didn’t like it? Color me surprised. How many namepros members own names that are comparable to telepathy or webmagic?
I nvr rly got to talk yo keith, idk if ever having an exchange. I nvr liked him based on a few of his posts that i glazed over. I find it ironic he thinks, ironically, we should use computer bots to read and sort our email…what a dunce.
Now, its easy to setup a bot to send out spam emails with generic offers. Id bet hes one of the lowball spammers and also probably trying to sell via spam, based on his support of using robots for the job. Click my name for namepros warning!
Seriously keith, if you reading…get off ‘moderated to mislead because we have extreme bias and also must protect our snowFLAKEs’ platform and tell us how to make a robot field our inquires. Everyone dying to know.
How about an input field, “please input a higher offer…” Until they they hit the ‘number’, will that work, pros?
They’ll try $10..100..1000..10,000? Bingo, offer accepted, forward them to whatever, checkout page. Lock the domain page down with a big THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SOLD! No new offers..keep em locked out for a couple months and badger him for payment.
Would you like aftermarkets to give you the ability to charge a domain inquiry fee?
Yes, because i want to know the IDENTITY of the potential buyer, before I sell my domain-name.
I suspect there is a fair bit of pent up demand for this.
The Domain Agents implementation of it is average. Have to pay them a commission on the sale, lose 50% of the $20 and then have to specially do a withdrawal request in time or the money is lost.
On DomainAgents you only pay commission on a BIN listing, on Make Offer, the buyer pays the commission and the escrow.com fee.
So if you use our site for your Make Offer listings, you will pay no commission plus get $10 for every paid offer regardless of whether you reach an agreement.
You are arguing a technicality, obviously this comes off the price the buyer would be willing to pay the seller.
I don’t think it is the case that users get $10 for “every” paid offer because if you don’t login in time and request the withdrawal you lose the money.
I would suggest getting bit more user friendly here because at the moment I get the feeling you don’t really want to pay out those $10 earnings. I don’t think you can really expect to get customers by trying to make money in 3 different ways.
1. commission on sale
2. taking 50% of the inquiry fee
3. putting roadblocks in front of getting paid the remaining 50%
I’d say Method 1. is probably enough, suspect you will get “disrupted” eventually by someone who can offer a similar service in a more reasonable way.
There should be no time frame to get the money. If it was collected it was collected, put it in an account and let the person withdraw whenever they want.
Thats a double-edged sword for sure. People who are locked onto your name will pay, but those who might have the budget you seek yet consider it as one of the alternatives are very likely to go for an alternative which is easier to communicate with.
Seems like good idea. If prospects are willing to pay for enquiries, that means they are serious, and would be willing to pay at least 4-5fig
LOL, yes that is one of the major gripes I have. They inquire about “a” domain and then we ask “what is your offer” They say $50. Then you say not interested, They say “how much do you want”. Then you say ,example, $20k and they say not a chance. Wasters.
I’d probably wait until a large portfolio trials this. True lowballers are not annoying enough to risk genuine leads. I doubt spam is too much to handle with less than a couple of thousand names. I had a low offer the other week along with a kind of snarky reply after quoting high. Doesn’t bother me much, and a polite (but firm) reply because I don’t want to burn my lead and pipeline.
Unfortunately buyers sometimes say shit and then I guess they get shy or something (too proud?) and won’t continue negotiating. I don’t take these things personally, so I try and keep the lead comfortable enough to return to the table. In this case the appropriate marketing rep for the group contacted me a couple of days later for a serious negotiation. And similar story for most other domains I sold.
Moral of this post, be professional because like attracts like.
Don’t like it to be honest.
It may be good if your domain info is not listed publicly, but I don’t think it helps sales. I think it prevents and hinders sales. Wrong direction.
Once someone pays, they EXPECT something. When they get a price they don’t like and that will be nearly 100%, they will feel ripped off.
I don’t like the idea of charging a domain inquiry fee either.
I’ve procrastinated too much on getting all my domains priced/listed (bad domainer .. bad .. lol) .. but aside from a couple I listed on Afternic and Sedo ages ago, the majority of my sales this year have been because people found me via WhoIs!
Obviously they might have first found my domains anyways if they had landers or were listed/priced at all the marketplaces .. but there definitely is a tangible percentage of sales that come through WhoIs.
I like the idea of charging an inquiry fee but, Rick is right, if there is no deal met the person making the inquiry will feel cheated, in some cases the prospect may look for an alternative domain where they dont have to pay an inquiry fee. I would be more open to the idea if the inquiry fee was around 2 – 5 dollars and if a deal was reached the domainer would have the ability to credit back the fee. If the goal is to discourage bots almost any amount of money will stop bots or spammers from making offers but, serious buyers may lose interest if the fee is too high, I feel like if something like this is going to work it needs to be done on a universal level where it is a standard option on all major domain marketplaces.
No way.
I love getting fake spammy offers because I feel
Good that my domains are in demand.
If people are tired of $20 offers, then just increase your minimum offer threshold.
That being said, I do think the process of paying could filter out a wave of tire kickers, while at the same time serving as a minimum level of authentication of the potential buyer/broker.
Just make it $1. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but at least people won’t feel ripped off when you refuse their offer, and the fact they made the effort to pay anything I feel would weed out a good percentage (although not all) of disingenuous offers.
I think the brokerages with high quality domain names would love this, at first. However as owner, I don’t like it too much.
You don’t see auction websites require users to pay to make bids. Why? because it is all about reduce “friction” and increase “foot traffic”. It has proven that more foot traffic, less friction increase sales.
I’d also prefer other less obnoxious ways to pre-qualify inquiries, such as completing a survey.
Another, less obvious reason against charging an inquiry fee: Even when people making inquiries with low-balled offers, it is an important benchmark/data point to collect. A name with lots of inquiries means it has the potential to be a strong brand name, that it resonates with lots of people, which in turn, makes it more valuable to the right buyer.
I think that using a lander that indicates what minimum level of offer you are considering, or setting the minimum offer if the lander is at a marketplace, is all that is needed for 99% of cases. I feel, as Rick indicated above, those who paid to make an offer would feel cheated if the offer did not work out, and in general sales would go down if the practice became standard. The issue of those making offers and then not completing them seem on the rise, but that is a different issue requiring some other solution, probably.
-Bob
I agree Bob, but what I took from Web Magic, this is not about our price, IT COSTS MONEY TO TALK TO US, we value our time, it’s not like how someone on Namepros wrote, something for nothing.
Web Magic charges you to talk to them about giving them money.
(reposting the comment I just posted on NamePros, where a long thread happened after this blog post was linked to)
Wow, very long thread that happened in just a single day. I’ve not done this for my own domains (yet; I might never do it, but was tossing it out as a thought), but can see the appeal of why Webmagic/Telepathy and others might desire it. It likely wouldn’t be effective for an “average” domain name, but for the very elite domain names, one only really wants to deal with qualified buyers. There are different methods to qualify them, and a cash payment might be another means.
To go to the real estate example that was brought up earlier in this thread by some, one might hold an open house for a $400,000 or $1 million home. That won’t happen for a $50 million or $100 million property, e.g. the kind that show up in the Mansion section of the WSJ on Fridays (you’ll likely have to show you have a high net worth, or deal with a buyer’s broker who has qualified you, etc., before the seller will talk).
Some folks suggested “just put a minimum offer”. But, that won’t help much if the “buyer” is behind some throwaway Gmail account and disappears after a negotiation (a negotiation that uses time/energy). [such a buyer that disappears after paying $20 still leaves the registrant $20 ahead!]
One advantage of making the $20 payment (or whatever amount) to enter discussions is that the owner will know the real identity of who they’re dealing with (as opposed to a throwaway identity), as presumably Paypal or other payment methods will pass the real name/email with the payment.
It’s interesting that if you go to GoDaddy and search for a domain (pick one you own), GoDaddy will charge people money to attempt to buy it (fixed amount + percentage commission). So, the GoDaddy “broker” is getting paid to talk to you, why shouldn’t you get paid to respond? (or ideally cut out the middleman, and deal directly with the buyer)
Indeed, note that GoDaddy charges that fixed fee — imagine if the fixed fee was $0, and they only charged a commission for success. Then they’d have many fake buyers using their negotiating platform, wasting their brokers’ time (many buyers would back out, too). GoDaddy will charge the fixed fee to qualify their own clients — i.e. they’re not going to “do the work” of sending emails/phone calls unless they know they’re going to get compensated….and on top of that they want a percentage commission afterwards. But, that fixed fee is important to them to qualify their own buyers. (probably other buyer brokers qualify in a similar manner, e.g. hourly fee, some portion paid in advance or with a minimum total fee, plus a success fee or percentage commission).
Anyhow, this is getting long, and I had to go to bed soon, but it might be productive to think of pros/cons (some of which are above).
One obvious “con” is that it reduces the opportunity to educate some buyers, who don’t understand the value of domains (and are unwilling to spend $20).
Also, “spam” provides some data or business intelligence, which one might no longer get. If domain A gets 30 fake/lowball inquiries in a year, whereas domain B gets 2 fake/lowball inquiries in a year, and domain C gets no fake/lowball inquiries in a year, it’s probably true that Domain A is desirable (worth renewing), and more desirable than domain B, and domain C is probably less desirable than domain B.
Who is this Keith he just sounds dumb, he keeps talking about weakness, no one at namepros could hold Greg McLemore’s jock, are these people serious?
It’s a very bad idea to create a higher barrier for buyers to engage with a domain listing.
We’ve experimented with this extensively at DAN.COM and over a longer period of time (6-12 months) you’ll always sell fewer domains by pushing some interested qualified buyers to an alternative option due to the creation of to conversion killing barriers like:
1: No known price indication for the domain (the more open questions you leave to buyers the sooner they’ll drop their interest)
2: Having to pay to get a price, without any guarantees. How many times has anyone here paid to get the listing price of a house you’re interested in? It really makes no sense.
3: Sending them to a poorly designed price request form that’s not very well maintained and has technical issues often (we know this because our broker team has to use those forms once in a while for clients).
To conclude: yes you might get fewer tire-kickers and fake offers, but you also will for sure make less revenue and if making the maximum revenue as investor is what you are looking for I wouldn’t advice to ask for a payment before you send your listing price to a buyer.
Inquiry Fee?
I would welcome just one inquiry!
Haven’t sold a name in just under 2 years!
Fee?
It must be nice for the kings of the industry to kvetch about suffering inquiries not to there liking!