How Do You Re-Sell a Domain Name? 64
dclayman wonders: " I've never sold a domain before. I just received a $400 offer for a domain I own (radicaltrust), but I don't know if I should sell it or auction it off. If I auction it, what site should I use? I could really use the extra cash, and I was hoping to get some ideas and advice from other readers. So, what's the best way to go about selling a domain?" Of course, selling your domain is only half of the issue. What's the best way to go about smoothly transferring the domain, once it is sold?
Use Sedo.com (Score:5, Informative)
I've had experience with a few services... (Score:5, Informative)
Each service has it's own features- Network Solutions, erm, solution is really just a way to make a safe transaction on a domain sale to an independent buyer, it offers an escrow service and other protections. Afternic has a similar service but they also have a nice domain name listing service where you can auction your domain like eBay. There may be others, but these are the only 2 I've had experience with, albeit from the buying side.
For your situation with this buyer I recommend to at least use Network Solutions' service to manage the transaction-- it offers protection to both you and the buyer, though there is a fee of course.
By the way, Network Solutions service also offers free domain name appraisals (Afternic has one too but charges). I don't know how much to trust it because for your domain I received values ranging over $10,000 when I first queried it on down to the $500 range later on. It seems to take into account the number of queries for a domain name? I'm not sure, but try it and see what it says now [certifiedo...ervice.com]. Also, if RadicalTrust is also the name of a product or service then that price could be higher (or possible lower) then the estimated value according to Network Solutions.
If I were you I'd post it on Afternic.com for auction and tell your buyer about it. Your sure to incur some new offers from this
Good luck!
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I *have* had some domains that I've purchased stay relatively consistent for estimates on that site in the past, so I don't know whatsup with it now. Maybe they don't like us playing with it
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Now if I could just get someone to offer me that much...
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Afternic.com (Score:3, Interesting)
Advertise it on Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Political Related domains seem to be hot ... (Score:2)
P.S. My guess is the respective party would pay a lot for Ugly Democrats [uglydemocrats.com] and Ugly Republicans [uglyrepublicans.com]
Domain value (Score:1, Interesting)
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Not looking for insider secrets or anything, but in general, on what basis do you appraise a domain?
Obviously a popular word (like the infamous "sex.com" domain) might fetch a good penny, but for most of them, the value would seem to depend entirely on having a buyer before-the-fact. Unlike jewelry, domains don't count as fungible.
Re:Domain value (free computer appraising service) (Score:4, Informative)
i'm not sure how accurate it is, but it does appraising for free and tells you the factors involved.
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Contact a broker (Score:2)
There are lots of tricks on either side to negotiating the best possible price, and having a third party involved can be helpful in many circumstances. In addition it can be helpful so that an escrow process can happen if the parties involved do not have an existing and trusting relationship.
Furthermore, you get to take advantage of your broker's real world experience
So you were sitting on it... (Score:4, Insightful)
The world would be a much nicer place if we weren't all trying to maximise profits all the time.
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But I do agree, that guy should take the $400 and be done with it.
Re:So you were sitting on it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Antiques Roadshow much?
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My suggestion -- and the tactic I used to sell? Email him back that you've never really thought about selling the domain before, but you haven't
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Snatching it away from a fair offer and holding out for the maximum you can get is rather a nasty money grabbing business in the same vein as the royalties the reco
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Presumably this car is worth more than $3000 to you.
Now, you may notice that I mentioned "fair price". $3000 is not a fair price. It's clearly worth more to you than that. You're obviously keeping it around because either it will have value or you value it in itself. What do you think it's worth? How about if I offered market value for it? you'd suddenyl think "wow, I can make money from this" and sell it to someone else?
We don't know how to value things (Score:2)
Suppose he sells the domain name, and the guy he sells it to turns around and sells it in turn for 10x the price, because *he*
I would go with a free service (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, I would go with a free, commissions only service. The domain sale sites are already charging a commission on the sale, so it just seems like scumbaggery to also charge a "membership" fee on top of that. Not to mention that selling domain names is a total hit or miss thing - I've sold 2 out of maybe a dozen that I have put up for sale. For that reason I haven't tried afternic.com. I will try sedo.com now as mentioned above, since I checked and saw that it's free (commissions only). I have also heard of them before.
I have also used tdnam.com in the past. It is free (commissions only) if you have your domains registered through godaddy.com. I sold two domains there with no problems whatsoever. It has an automatic escrow service, so you wait until they receive the money from the buyer and tell you that it's ok to start the transfer of ownership. They were fairly low-priced domains, selling for $50 and $200, but I didn't haggle or wait for other offers - I just took the first offer that came along.
One more cool thing about TDNAM (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny results from dnScoop.com (Score:1, Funny)
Indexed Pages for google.com
Google: 7,090,000
MSN Search: 2,497,919
Yahoo!: 27,439,177
AlltheWeb: 27,000,000
AltaVista: 27,400,000
The estimated value of http://google.com/ [google.com] is: $1,390,000,000
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Transition BEFORE you sell (Score:4, Informative)
The last thing you want to do is sell the domain and then realize that your other three domains are still locked to an email address on the old domain.
Caution (Score:2)
So, offers for domain can be a ruse to establish that your purpose of holding it is resale, and that's one step towards being yanked from you.
The issues are listed in the "domain name arbitration" area of the rules set out by ICANN.
I would certainly expect to get a cashed check in the bank before doing any steps in transfer. Folks th
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Tenets [etymonline.com]. Tennants are people who live in a building owned by someone else.
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That's Tenants you're thinking of.
Tennants [tennants.co.uk] is an auctioneer in Yorkshire, UK.
Not to be confused with Tennents [wikipedia.org], which is a popular lager in Scotland (and Tennents Super [blueyonder.co.uk], which is popular with tramps).
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Sale and Appraisal (Score:2, Informative)
Four Factors To Determine Your Domain's Value (Score:3, Informative)
1. Existing traffic - Domain parking services can convert visits into revenue.
2. Backlinks from other relevant sites in your niche. Google values these in their rankings.
3. Age of the Domain: Google's algorithm gives greater authority to established sites, so domains that have been on the web for a few years will generally fetch more in a sale than a newer site with equivalent traffic and backlinks.
4. PageRank, a Google scoring system developed by Larry Page. It's a 1 to 10 scale, the higher the better. This used to be more highly valued, but Google sometimes resets the PageRank when it figures out a domain has changed hands, diluting its value as a sales metric.
URL Trends [urltrends.com] is a service that provides a quick, free analysis of a domain's PageRank, backlinks and Alexa rank (which has some usefulness in assessing broader traffic trends). URL Trends shows that the submitter's domain, radicaltrust (we assume that means dot-com), has a PageRank of 0, and just one incoming link, but decent age (online since 2001, according to Archive.org). $400 seems like a pretty good offer. The buyer must be motivated by a specific need for that domain, and there's little in the stats to suggest you'd get more in an auction.
Auction it but... (Score:1)
Keep in mind that business.com and several other domains have sold for MILLIONS. That said, yours may not be worth ev