Discuss your Epik Experience!

[dande]

I think Epik is building the best ever Domain Lander in the history of domaining, and it really needs to be talked about extensively. That's why I am creating this discussion thread. A lot of thought process really goes into the project. And I can see (for the first time) a landing page that is built from the stand point of domainers rather than for just the marketplace itself.

Everything you have ever dreamt of getting or seeing in a professional landing page can be found in the new Epik marketplace landing page design.

Some of my Favorites Features:

1. The ability to optimize your "domain for sale" landing page to actually rank on Google, displaying your sales pitch/domain description. I just did that with few of my generic domain names such as ASAP.TV, targeting certain keywords, and they are showing pretty well on Google. That's a huge plus in my marketing effort.

2. Being able to change background image is another huge one for me. If you are good with pictures and images, you will surely find this very useful. I did that with Nagasaki.org and the result was truly amazing, showing the city of Nagasaki right at the background.

There are too many positive features and I don't want to mention all of them, all alone

So I am leaving you guys to share and discuss what you loves most or dislike about the new Epik marketplace and the landing pages.

The only negative for me is the checkout process. There are too many terms and conditions buttons to tick before checking out. It will be nice if they can streamline those into one beautiful big button

They also need to place the checkout button directly under the payment options. Right now it is awkwardly place somewhere below at the sidebar, which I don't find cool at all.

Sales experience is also welcomed in this discussion. I haven't had any sells so far at Epik because I started using the marketplace just recently, but the future is looking so bright.

 

[namemarket]

I am a big fan of Make Offer pricing. Part of the reason why is because you get more inquiries, but also because you can tailor your pricing in real-time. We monitor the inquiries 24/7 through email and chat. If we see a large offer or an offer from a legit prospect, we'll help you close the sale. The other reason why I like Make offer is that if the prospect is big-time, you can ask a ridiculous price, e.g. we have seen sales of nothingburger multi-word domains go for $200K+ simply because the seller asked for a high opening price. Some crypto buyers in particular can pay above normal.........

Sound like a great platform and very good points Rob. Congrats.

A problem is to get on Godaddy and Afternic premium network for wider exposure and get fast transfer status (which I think is important, but not too sure about it) you must have a buy it now price (maximum 25k BIN).

 

[CJ6]

I'm a huge fan of Epik. I think I have 95% of my domains there.

A couple of suggestions...
1) Ability to have multiple marketplace portals. I think I can only have 1 right now.
2) Bring the lowest price for daily diamonds to $9. There are some domains that I like, but not ~$27 (after renewal) at the cheapest.
3) I had more... just can't think of them right now.

I love Epik. I wish I had a $69,995 sale. (I'd save some of it for buying domains at Epik... just sayin... the rest, for bills.)

 

[Rob Monster]

I'm a huge fan of Epik. I think I have 95% of my domains there.

A couple of suggestions...
1) Ability to have multiple marketplace portals. I think I can only have 1 right now.
2) Bring the lowest price for daily diamonds to $9. There are some domains that I like, but not ~$27 (after renewal) at the cheapest.
3) I had more... just can't think of them right now.

I love Epik. I wish I had a $69,995 sale. (I'd save some of it for buying domains at Epik... just sayin... the rest, for bills.)

Thanks @CJ6. I know you are having some success.

To your comments:

- The ability to have multiple branded marketplace is on the horizon. However, the higher impact marketing tool is the SSL landers so we prioritized that ahead of the ability to have multiple online stores. For folks who don't know what that is about, see this overview or these help articles.

- As for daily diamonds, we'll do that -- let the price drop to an even lower number for the final hour for those who want to hold out for the bargain basement. We'll leave that as an insider secret for NamePros members. For those who don't know DAILY DIAMONDS, it is here, with fresh drops daily.

Keep those ideas coming.

 

[Rob Monster]

Sound like a great platform and very good points Rob. Congrats.

A problem is to get on Godaddy and Afternic premium network for wider exposure and get fast transfer status (which I think is important, but not too sure about it) you must have a buy it now price (maximum 25k BIN).

Actually Epik is on Sedo and Afternic MLS and authorized for fast-transfer.

Here is how I would play this game:

1. List the domains at Epik with Make Offer. Swing for the fences. I would use our parking landers if you want verified stats and/or the ability to display leasing options.

2. List the domains at Sedo and Afternic with BIN pricing. If someone searches for these domains, we'll still see those prices through our system. However, parking landers will show Make Offer not BIN!

I think that is a pretty elegant combo solution that gives maximum liquidity without sacrificing upside.

 

[CJ6]

Thanks @CJ6. I know you are having some success.

To your comments:

- The ability to have multiple branded marketplace is on the horizon. However, the higher impact marketing tool is the SSL landers so we prioritized that ahead of the ability to have multiple online stores. For folks who don't know what that is about, see this overview or these help articles.

- As for daily diamonds, we'll do that -- let the price drop to an even lower number for the final hour for those who want to hold out for the bargain basement. We'll leave that as an insider secret for NamePros members. For those who don't know DAILY DIAMONDS, it is here, with fresh drops daily.

Keep those ideas coming.

Yeah, those landing pages are absolutely great! I went from having a website pointing to the purchase page to parking all my domains. I love them... just wish i had more time to customize each domain.

 

[Rob Monster]

Yeah, those landing pages are absolutely great! I went from having a website pointing to the purchase page to parking all my domains. I love them... just wish i had more time to customize each domain.

The customization is definitely worth doing, especially for any premium .com. The setup page is basically a custom CMS that was designed from the ground up for domain parking. As we learn more about what works, we'll add more tools with recommended best practices.

The landers themselves are running on a fast global CDN so pages should load instantly almost everywhere. We are working on a few more CDN locations to make it fast in even more places, but you will find those landers are fast.

Also, you will find that the SSL landers are mobile-optimized for pretty much an mobile device.

One important thing we solved is the issue of counting traffic on the periphery of the CDN. In other words, the pages load fast, but we also can count each unique visit regardless of which CDN node is hit. The stats are aggregated every 24 hours. Anyone using CloudFlare CD, for example, will way under-report traffic!

 

[namemarket]

Actually Epik is on Sedo and Afternic MLS and authorized for fast-transfer. Here is how I would play this game: 1. List the domains at Epik with Make Offer. Swing for the fences. I would use our parking landers if you want verified stats and/or the ability to display leasing options. 2. List the domains at Sedo and Afternic with BIN pricing. If someone searches for these domains, we'll still see those prices through our system. However, parking landers will show Make Offer not BIN! I think that is a pretty elegant combo solution that gives maximum liquidity without sacrificing upside.

That sounds like a fabulous plan Rob.

When Afternic refers to the "Premium Network" for wider exposure is that the same as the MLS you are on or something different?

P.S. Do you accept for sale listings which are not necessarily registered at Epik?

 

[Rob Monster]

It would be nice to have a universal setting for displaying the domain names with either lower case or upper case letters (or both as GoDaddy Auctions does).

Also, I think it is not possible to bulk upload a background image for all your listings?

As to the "Verified by TrustRatings.com" thing in the upper right corner, I went to the website and can see it is owned by Epik, so not really sure buyers will see this as an independent seal of approval. I'm not really sure what it is about to be honest

As @Ala Dadan explained, some more aesthetic features are coming.

On changing the casing, it is actually configurable in your control panel for any domain. The menu option is called "Domain Transforms and Keywords". You can custom edit the casing:

Inside that feature, you can edit how the domain is displayed and any keywords that should pipe through to on-page meta tags.

As for TrustRatings.com, the background there is that TrustPilot.com wanted to charge us $6000 per year, and that was just for Epik.com. That did not help with any domains held by customers if we wanted to display a Trust Seal on parking landers where the page resolves to the SSL-protected domain. So, we hired a team to build an alternative to TrustPilot. It will be fully live later this quarter so that any site can be reviewed. The scoring algorithm will combine authoritative data with smart polling that prevents people from gaming the ratings through ballot stuffing of bogus ratings. I believe it is a worthy project. It is owned by Epik but may ultimately be divested into its own legal entity with its own ownership structure. However, in the world of free speech and civil liberty, we believed it was important to have a Rating platform that was not controlled by Silicon Valley.

 

[Rob Monster]

That sounds like a fabulous plan Rob.

When Afternic refers to the "Premium Network" for wider exposure is that the same as the MLS you are on or something different?

P.S. Do you accept for sale listings which are not necessarily registered at Epik?

We have to approve your account to list and sell domains that are not registered at Epik. NamePros members are almost alway approved, so just introduce yourself if you don't already have the ability to park and sell non-Epik domains.

 

[Rob Monster]

@Rob Monster I plan to try ad retargeting in facebook and adwords, but do you have any sample on what the ad should be. I have experience in adwords and its all come down to wording in the ad and image used.

I don't have a best practice for the re-targeting ads. I just know that people are doing it and having success with it apparently. I am sharing it here just in case more folks want to work on that and report their findings in this thread, for example. There might be strong potential there for increasing conversion rates.

Right now we don't differentiate between a type-in visitor and a visitor who arrives via organic search or from a referring URL that is not exact match to the domain. I will discuss with @Ala Dadan and Epik engineering about allowing the disposition to be captured. This might allow you to re-target just the type-in targets.

I wish there was a way to target people who do a WHOIS lookup. I am sure we could re-target anyone who looked up at Whois.epik.com. What would be harder is re-targeting folks who looked up through a port 43 lookup. If anyone figures out a solution there, let me know!

 

[frank-germany]

my internal tests haven't prooven more sales
when SEO done
when layout changes

SEO is not needed for domains for sale
and most likely will not work
as content and links are the main triggers for SEO
you can't have that on a great for sale lander

more options to users don't improve sales

you don't see the forest because of too many trees

 

[Mister Funsky]

Skipping to the end so I can chime in as a happy seller.

It's about an even split for names that sell without buyer interaction and those that have a bin with a minimum and I have to do a little negotiation. It is awesome to log onto my email account and see a notice where a deposit has been made into my masterbucks!

 

[frank-germany]

I wish there was a way to target people who do a WHOIS lookup. I am sure we could re-target anyone who looked up at Whois.epik.com. What would be harder is re-targeting folks who looked up through a port 43 lookup. If anyone figures out a solution there, let me know!

privacy?

 

[Rob Monster]

my internal tests haven't prooven more sales
when SEO done
when layout changes

SEO is not needed for domains for sale
and most likely will not work
as content and links are the main triggers for SEO
you can't have that on a great for sale lander

more options to users don't improve sales

you don't see the forest because of too many trees

Frank - SEO is absolutely needed for domain sales. Here's why.

Let's suppose you own the domain name ILoveGermany.com and someone builds a marketing campaign called "I Love Germany". The people who run that campaign don't own the domain they need, and that's all fine and well until the day they found out that ILoveGermany.com is ranked on page 1 of major search engines and people are being diverted to a site that is run by a different commercial entity. Now it is a competitive vulnerability that they don't own the domain, but also a clear ROI if they do own it.

As for forests and trees, I think you are mistaken there. It is precisely because we get to see the inner workings of a lot of forests that we have figured out how to grow better trees. I also have the habit of speaking very openly which I realize annoys you at times but I think others finds refreshing since they are used to registrars, marketplaces and escrow agents that ignore their input, and do little to engage the industry in a constructive effort to lift all boats. There are some heroes though like @easyDNS.

 

[branding]

Also, if anyone wants to use their own custom DNS, I would encourage experimenting there. Here is an IP address that can be used for that and still runs on our CDN and Anycast: 5.254.19.115

We are continuously testing and scaling what works. All ideas for best practices are welcome.

Does this work for domains not regged at Epik? Like, I hold my domain at another registrar, but list my domains through your marketplace?

So I would point the A records of ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com to your ip address. And the A records (using NS records ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com) for every domain I list to that ip to make it resolve to your lander?

Would ssl be working on my landers in this workaround?

Any change you could provide a second anycast ip connecting to your servers? It's required by some registrars and expected practice in general.

 

[branding]

Furthermore, without getting too technical, is there a way to query your API for domains I list at your marketplace?

And add domains, remove them or update pricing? I haven't checked out your API yet to be honest and can work out the technical bit myself just curious if the options are there.

On another note, do you happen to have any insight on the Geo location of buyers? I work a lot with Dutch buyers and in my experience Sedo and DAN (obviously) are quite known and trusted so using them would presumably result in a higher conversion rate.

My current setup is fully automated using DAN but I'd be up for some experimenting.

And finally, this may be a dumb question, If I list a domain for sale, can I make a redirect to it, like https://epik.com/ buy/domain.com or whatever link structure you're using?

Sorry for all the questions. I've been planning to try your marketplace for a while now and this thread kinda triggered me again to actually look into it.

 

[Kassey Lee]

Looks very promising. I just signed up and started looking at your Daily Diamonds. I'd like to see more filters such as No Numbers and No Hyphen, and the ability to save the filter so that I can use it to check everyday. Thanks.

 

[Rob Monster]

Looks very promising. I just signed up and started looking at your Daily Diamonds. I'd like to see more filters such as No Numbers and No Hyphen, and the ability to save the filter so that I can use it to check everyday. Thanks.

Thanks Kassey - Daily Diamonds is usually not a long list. You can subscribe to get the list via email every day here:

https://marketplace.epik.com/email-notifications

Right now:

- There is 6N.com domain listed

- Mucri.com - 5 letter brandable, that should logically be owned by these
folks: https://www.facebook.com/MucriWomanStore/

The prices are $29 now but shortly drops to $19.

As for adding smarter filters, will review with @Ala Dadan. We have a major re-do coming soon for the Domain Marketplace. Ala might share a preview for input.

 

[Ala Dadan]

As for adding smarter filters, will review with @Ala Dadan. We have a major re-do coming soon for the Domain Marketplace. Ala might share a preview for input.

@Kassey Lee here is a couple of screenshots from the upcoming design for the Domains Marketplace at Epik:
https://invis.io/EGSS5DWBNK2
https://invis.io/4QSS5E2RW3H

Also, Epik Users will have the ability to upgrade / create their own custom Domain Name Marketplaces using the new platform.

The listing description/content on each listing would also be used on the parked page if the user turned that option on.

 

[dande]

2. List the domains at Sedo and Afternic with BIN pricing. If someone searches for these domains, we'll still see those prices through our system. However, parking landers will show Make Offer not BIN!

I think that is a pretty elegant combo solution that gives maximum liquidity without sacrificing upside.

That's exactly what I have done for all my domains. I sensed it's gonna be a perfect combo

 

[mAd MaX]

A fan of @EPIK here

 

[Recons.Com]

I am a big fan of Make Offer pricing. Part of the reason why is because you get more inquiries, but also because you can tailor your pricing in real-time. We monitor the inquiries 24/7 through email and chat. If we see a large offer or an offer from a legit prospect, we'll help you close the sale.

The other reason why I like Make offer is that if the prospect is big-time, you can ask a ridiculous price, e.g. we have seen sales of nothingburger multi-word domains go for $200K+ simply because the seller asked for a high opening price. Some crypto buyers in particular can pay above normal.

One overwhelming advantage of Epik over pretty much all other marketplaces is that we give you the contact details -- phone, email, name, IP address and comment --- of the person contacting you. So, you can tailor your price based on context. That "intelligence" can be of overwhelming value in tailoring your offer.

The inquiries are delivered instantly. We don't filter the comments either, which means if the person inquiring wants to give you a long story about why they need this domain, you can review that and decide whether to offer a lease, a sale or seller-financing. In some cases, Epik will even provide the financing.

Last but not least, we offer integrated LEASING of domains which means that the lessee can manage their domain completely self-service. This is because we are a REGISTRAR first and foremost. This is also cuts way down on domain fraud. This case of fraud prevention was recently discussed here.

Does a domain have to be with Epik for using the landers?

 

[Kassey Lee]

That's exactly what I have done for all my domains. I sensed it's gonna be a perfect combo

Sorry just a side question. For domains managed by Epik, can you list them on Afternic from within Epik UI unlike the traditional way of listing on Afternic and then wait for email confirmation from registrar?

 

[Rob Monster]

Does a domain have to be with Epik for using the landers?

We can definitely approve any account to be able to park domains registered elsewhere. NamePros members are almost always approved for this service. As a matter of policy, we like to know the customer before enabling these features on non-Epik domains. Just contact us to tell us about your domains, or login at Epik.com and them under Domains --> Add Domains. This is free.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I like a lot that Epik has incredible landers, and thanks for all the great information and responses on this thread from @Rob Monster and @Ala Dadan.

It is also nice that Epik is one of the registrars who have integration with both Afternic and Seco networks. Re the following....

2. List the domains at Sedo and Afternic with BIN pricing. If someone searches for these domains, we'll still see those prices through our system. However, parking landers will show Make Offer not BIN!

I have always been a little confused about whether it is OK or not to have a domain with BIN/fast on both. I realize that odds are low of a domain selling both places simultaneously, but from this suggestion am I correct that with fast transfer essentially it will sell to the first network and the second will not let it process so it is OK to list on both with BIN prices under fast transfer?

Bob