I am sure just about everyone is familiar with the sales commission changes coming across all GoDaddy properties, (GoDaddy.com, Afternic, DAN.com and Uniregistry).
For those not familiar,
To simplify commissions, effective Feb. 1, 2023, each marketplace is moving to a 15% commission rate for domain names pointed to Afternic, Dan, or Uniregistry nameservers at the time of the sale. If your domain name does not point to Afternic, Dan or Uniregistry nameservers, the commission charged will be 25%.
To receive the 15% commission rate, you must have your DNS pointed to one of the following nameservers:
- afternic.com
- smartname.com
- uniregistrymarket.link
- dan.com
- undeveloped.com
- internettraffic.com
- cashparking.com
Bob Hawkes wrote a fantastic article over at Namepros, it covers the entire sales commission universe. It’s worth reading and bookmarking.
So now the question comes down to this. What is a fair commission? Domain investors are in partnership whether they like it or not, with aftermarket and escrow websites. We count on them to collect payment, deal with any potential chargebacks and fraud issues.
They are making money off of us trusting our domain name sales with them. But there is a lot of anger regarding the upcoming GoDaddy changes. There are those for years who felt that commissions were just too high if all someone did was click a link on your website and you get 20% of their sale. The notion has always been, “My domain name would have sold no matter what, you just got lucky they landed on your website.”
There are of course cheap options you can deal with Escrow.com. You can use Sedo for just 3% to process an external domain transfer.
From Sedo:
The applicant is charged a fee of 3% of the gross selling price, with a minimum fee of $60 for category 1 domains, and $200 for category 2 domains. (See price list) Upon request, we will also assist you in dividing the fee between the buyer and seller.
Please note: The standard marketplace commission will still apply to external transactions, if the parties involved have carried out negotiations over the Sedo marketplace for the same domain. Also, please be aware that additional fees may be applied by your registrar or bank. There is an additional 3% express processing fee applied to payments over $500 made using Alipay, PayPal or via Credit Card.
So please give your opinion in the comments, what is a fair commission for a domain name sale?
10% it’s the most standard number around in any industry. How much does an agent make? A finder’s fee is usually 10%. Anything more is a rip off.
I tend to agree with 10% I don’t know why it should ever be more and the whole fixation on name servers why do you care if you get the sale?
5%
1%
If they are doing 1% are they passing along the credit card or Paypal processing fees to the seller? Or not accepting those as a form of payment. I don’t think anyone could run a business on 1%.
10% is fair.
15%, especially for a landing page sale, is a bit high.
To make it 15% could make sense for three & four figure sales. However, 15% on a six figure sale is beyond crazy. On a $500k sale you would have to give GoDaddy $75k.
What they achieved here is that all the best domains will migrate to other platforms.
It’s definitely not 25%.
Brad
My take on this is this:
1.If you have a poor quality domain name whatever you are trying to sell, will not sell because you got garbage.No matter where you listed or how much you want for it.It’s garbage.
2.If you have a good domain name it will sell automatically if you listed with Efty.com under $5k and you don’t pay no broker fee.Efty is linked with escrow.com I personally sold 70% of my names this way.
3.If you have a PREMIUM domain name the buyer could contact you again through Efty and then you start to negotiate.If the name is premium the buyer wants only YOUR domain name.
No matter how experts the brokers are 80% the value is in the domain name ONLY 20% is in the brokers skills.
Our biggest problem is that we don’t have patience and want to make little profit in short time.
Knowing this, why would we pay ANY commission to someone if you got a premium name?
So we got the name, the traffic, we bring the buyer, to pay a commission of 15% ?
Are we that dumb?
From now on, domain owners have to create their own marketplace. godaddy.com’s market share is getting too big. We have an obligation to decentralize their power. Does a 25% commission make sense? Our domain owners should also work together to resist them and try other ways. A 10% commission is acceptable. Isn’t that too much?
When people talk about “fair” usually it means the lowest price possible so they can make all the profits. Let’s stop using this nonsense term.
It’s not nonsense I don’t think it’s nonsense at all what term would you use ? I mean I realize you’re an expert on nonsense after reading a lot of your comments here and on name pros over the years you certainly know nonsense but there is a word that’s used by civilized intelligent human beings no it doesn’t mean that you can get all the profit but it’s the same reason why people use that when it comes to lending that’s why there’s usury laws what’s fair and what’s not next time get a clue or go tie yourself off.
10% if sold on one of the platforms (e.g. GoDaddy, Sedo, etc.) is fair and reasonable.
20% is fair and reasonable if handled by hard-working individual brokers doing actual outbound marketing (e.g. BuckleyMedia).
Relatedly, I’ve been testing DNWE for a couple of months now, and — despite high hopes — only two of 100+ of the well-priced (majority at $997), aged .coms I’m liquidating there have sold.
Would welcome any thoughts on / experiences with DNWE from my fellow domainers.
Were they merely a flash-in-the-pan back when they first launched?
10% its normal namecheap.com and godaddy.com they take 10% domain sell