DAN.COM Domain Marketplace (Official Thread)

[DAN.COM]

DAN.COM (formerly known as Undeveloped.com) is on a path to be become the biggest domain marketplace in the world. We use state of the art technology to solve everyday problems buyers and sellers in the domain industry face. At DAN.COM we focus on automating most processes required to buy & sell domains to increase a more efficient and active secondary market for domains.

What sets us apart is our strong focus on product development and customer satisfaction. We leave nothing to chance and every single feature and element we introduce is professionally and carefully designed and built.

DAN.COM is ranked in the top 5 best-rated marketplaces in the world (According to the biggest review platform Trustpilot) and in the domain industry, we're the domain marketplace with the highest rating with an average of 9,4 out of 10 points.

At DAN.COM you will get the highest value for the lowest commission around. Due to our domain transfer automation, we can offer significantly faster handling of domain transactions and payouts (usually within 24 hours) at the lowest fee charged by any domain marketplace.

We've been the first on many fronts and proudly will continue to keep innovating. We were the first to offer optimized for sale pages since 2013, the first to provide payment plans in the form of lease to own and rentals and also the first and only domain marketplace offering free SSL on all domains parked with us for over a year now.

Read more about DAN and our future plans here: https://blog.undeveloped.com/a-big-leap-forward-3a3cc59ed418

This thread is created to act as an informal communication board between the DAN team and the domain community. Feel free to post feedback here and to discuss how you use DAN.

What this thread is not meant for is support. Please contact our support team here: [email protected] when you need assistance.

Previous reviews under old brand: https://www.namepros.com/threads/undeveloped-com-experience.893201/

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Only in terms of population...
But NL economy is not small... it is among leaders.

 

[DNGear]

Only in terms of population...
But NL economy is not small... it is among leaders.

Its true. But those .nl sales were meant to be pump and dump.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

~5.9M .NL domains are registered as of today...
Almost 3 times more than Indian .in

 

[griff]

Its a small country. May be .nl registry has been trying to create some hype by selling and buying using DAN.

For many years (and probably still now), Netherlands had the highest domains-to-person ratio of any country, no hype just a very tech focused culture.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

As of today I did 2 sales of non-.NL/non-.com domains to NL endusers: 1K EUR and 2.4K EUR

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

For many years (and probably still now), Netherlands had the highest domains-to-person ratio of any country, no hype just a very tech focused culture.

.DE, .NL, .CO.UK/.UK aftermarket are leading among European ccTLDs... and for many years...

 

[Bob Hawkes]

An NP member has said he thinks it's possible DAN mainly gives preference to ones listed a long time on Dan.com so it moves up (but he was not sure).

It may or may not be correct but anyway If it's valid I have a big issues with it. Why in the world would DAN code their system to give bias favoring how long listed for sale on Dan? How long listed for sale means absolutely nothing as far as name value goes. How could it possibly be a factor?

I am not sure that I respectfully agree that it should mean nothing (see below) although I do agree that ideally other factors are much more important. Yes, true that in a sense a domain name listed for a day or two years on DAN does not change anything. However, in an environment where trust is paramount, a domain name really recently listed and by a user who just joined DAN might reasonably be ranked lower than if the same name was posted by someone who already has had a number of successful DAN transactions over a number of years.

I tried to reverse guess some parameters in the search. For example I tried entering CRISPR and they have 7 pages of search results (it is registered in many TLDs). When I select relevance as the ordering criteria on DAN they do present most of the exact CRISPR first (only one nonexact, a .com, near the bottom of first page). You will see that not completely but largely they seem to cluster by lister. Now that could mean two things, that a lister listed them at same time, and they are ranking that way, or that they give preference to long time DAN listers, which in my opinion should not override other factors but is reasonable to take into account in cases of near ties. I checked and the person with the 4 exact listed before mine has had an account since 2016 whereas mine only since 2017 and someone below me since 2018. This is not the only factor, though, as they list some of mine not until pages 2 and 3. But these are less old domains (the one on page one is 800+ days) and listed less long on DAN.

No matter what they do, I think the question is how should they prioritize. It seems to me that in order of priority they might consider the following:

• How close to exactly what is searched the name is? This is most important.
• How related the extension is to the word on left of dot and the search term? That is super hard to do well but critical. Like CRISPR with words like .medical, .clinic, .science should be rated way higher than say .casino or .pizza (sorry if anyone owns those, just an example), As part of this searches for for example CRISPRclinic should show CRISPR.clinic, and currently it does not.
• How well that extension sells.
• How popular the extension is registration wise.
• How long the person listing has been on DAN, how long this domain has been listed (although past a certain short period this should not matter) and how old the domain is (I am not a fan of age, but many do consider it means something). These should all be low priority things, only used to break ties.

But (as I said earlier) the best way to handle this is to have a bot automated to help narrow what a person is looking for. The presentation of a bunch of European country code options is irrelevant to someone looking for a global name, but highly relevant to someone searching for a name in for a business only in one of those countries.

Bob

 

[Zilla]

For many years (and probably still now), Netherlands had the highest domains-to-person ratio of any country, no hype just a very tech focused culture.

WOW....great country!

 

[namemarket]

.DE, .NL, .CO.UK/.UK aftermarket are leading among European ccTLDs... and for many years...

I am sure that is correct Jurgen but I suspect a majority of domains are owned in USA. And why show favoritism to those nations? So should we not deal with a company located in NL over that concern?

Did even more testing today and see numerous searches that rank NL Amsterdam and FRL (all 3 Netherlands tlds) at or near the top (including non-exact match) and often ahead of my exact match domains. I also see CO.UK #1 when searching for a common health condition.

So that UK name begs the question on why a co.uk (reg'd 6 years ago) rank #1 vs my .org (reg'd 18-years ago) in view of .org being very popular in the health industry and some of the largest health and wellness sites are dot-org and my IP address is in the US? Obviously the US has far more people with this medical condition than does UK based on population.

One more issue is as Bob Hawkes links to above, why would Crispr in 4 different ext all owned by "Birol" rank ahead of Bob's Crispr.science when Bob's name appears much more relevant to Crispr vs the top-4.

Another subject is there favoritism by Dan.com to some sellers such as Birol for example with 4 straight top Crispr rankings? There must be a way to get in the top 4 spots! Why have I never seen 4 of my names appearing consecutively in the top-10 even though I have many similar or same names in various tlds?

 

[Most Bay]

Congrats...
I like Dan.com for the fast and easy domain name submission.
Hope it will be fast and easy sale.

Thanks

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Because all these marketplaces are tuned for Verisign and for major/largest ccTLDs.
All other variants are considered as 2nd tier.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

One more issue is as Bob Hawkes links to above, why would Crispr in 4 different ext all owned by "Birol" rank ahead of Bob's Crispr.science when Bob's name appears much more relevant to Crispr vs the top-4.

I don't quite fully agree with this. I think that .clinic extension is VERY good with the word. I would have rated that equal or above my .science. Clearly some others could be anywhere, but I can see that even if one tried to do the ranking it is complex. For example an end user is more apt to like .clinic, .science, .services, .health, .solutions etc. but some other ones could still be popular - like .world for a sort of trade publication or .global for that or a company, etc. It is VERY hard to do proper ranking of results. Impossible really.

I would ask DAN to implement simply what @namemarket first post referenced. Totally ignoring the TLD means they miss many excellent exact matches, and Sedo do take into account the TLD so it is not that no search is doing exact match.

Bob

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Yes... Rocket science...

 

[namemarket]

Because all these marketplaces are tuned for Verisign and for major/largest ccTLDs. All other variants are considered as 2nd tier.

So is .org second tier?

What does tuned for Verisign mean?

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

So is .org second tier?

Yes.
Outside US.

 

[Windoms]

In the end their goal is to make sales happen.
So they will apply their formula to make sales happen.
We can't do much about it.
Just enjoy the platform. It's nice tool.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Use Afternic/GoDaddy for .ORG
Dan and Sedo will not help you.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I think they could tweak their search and make it better for both those seeking country codes and for other searchers. All of that being said, I suspect the majority of buyers do not find the domain via a marketplace search, as others have noted previously in this thread.

Bob

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

And no any surprise here...
If website is not global - then local ccTLD is always 1st choice for European endusers.
They don't pray for .com like it happens in the USA...

 

[namemarket]

And no any surprise here... If website is not global - then local ccTLD is always 1st choice for European endusers. They don't pray for .com like it happens in the USA...

I am outta here...

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

They are not obliged to care about your success...
They think only about their sales volume (profit)... especially if additional bonuses from Verisign etc.
Business world is hard... no any altruism.

Sell your domains independently... The best way.
And if BIN is your preferred model - you may use various marketplace listings.

If you want my opinion.

 

[Lox]

.

It does seem that they disproportionately sell European country codes. For example, right now in the last 5 sales listed there is one .com and four European country codes. A small insignificant sample, but if you follow the 'just missed' it seems a pattern to some degree.

I think they could tweak their search and make it better for both those seeking country codes and for other searchers. All of that being said, I suspect the majority of buyers do not find the domain via a marketplace search, as others have noted previously in this thread.

Bob

for the last sales check: https://explorer.dan.com

 

[DAN.COM]

Hi All,

I hadn't checked Namepros for a while and see this thread contains inaccuracies:

Some quick notes:

1: Our search has no bias towards any sellers or extensions in general. We do rank specific extensions higher based on the IP of the buyer and that's based on market data. So someone from the US will get .com's ranked higher while a Chinese seller will see more .cn domains ranked higher in the results.

2: More than 50% of our sellers hide their sales via their privacy settings. So checking out the sales we list and making any conclusions based on that data is inherently inaccurate.

3: We sell close to $2M a month in domain sales of which less than 5% is from .nl sales.

4: We do not allow any seller to rank higher in our search, the domains of BuyDomains, for example, had a negative ranking of -30 points in the past 4 years and recently we changed that and made their inventory rank as high as other sellers inventory. They own a lot of domains so when you cherry-pick some searches, their domains will show in the results indeed.

5: Our search does show some inconsistencies which we'll tackle. For example, searching for two keywords is not treated as exact match.

Kind regards,

Reza

 

[Bob Hawkes]

5: Our search does show some inconsistencies which we'll tackle. For example, searching for two keywords is not treated as exact match.

Thank you very much for the response to a number of points various people have raised. The central point in my opinion is whether search will consider TLD, since an important aspect of both the new gTLD program and earlier than that the legacy alternative extensions and even legacy .net and .info was the idea that match across the dot could convey important information.

It seems to me illogical that someone searching on a two word term AB will not be presented anywhere at all in results the domain name A.B even if it is in your marketplace (they will find it of course if search is only for A). Does your statement mean you are reconsidering this?

Thank you,

Bob

 

[DAN.COM]

Thank you very much for the response to a number of points various people have raised. The central point in my opinion is whether search will consider TLD, since an important aspect of both the new gTLD program and earlier than that the legacy alternative extensions and even legacy .net and .info was the idea that match across the dot could convey important information.

It seems to me illogical that someone searching on a two word term AB will not be presented anywhere at all in results the domain name A.B even if it is in your marketplace (they will find it of course if search is only for A). Does your statement mean you are reconsidering this?

Thank you,

Bob

Hi Bob,

I do you get you and over the course of time when gTLD's become more popular our search algorithm will change.

However, at the moment, there remains a clear preference by end-users for traditionally known extensions.

International business still prefer to go for .com's, local business prefer their ccTLD's and startups that can't afford the .com opt for the .co or .io often as well.

As a domain marketplace, we have to ensure that we keep track of trends and extension preferences and we have to base our algorithm on market data to ensure the highest possible number of conversions.

So I do understand the preference to rank nTLD's differently. You mentioned a .best domain for example. Less than 0,01% of all sales at DAN are .best domains so ranking those names much higher for keyword searches will yield fewer conversions on the market.

Having said this, there's always room for improvement at DAN, including our search. The constructive feedback in this thread has been noted . We might, for example, be able to introduce a filter that allows you to change the search logic.

Kind regards,

Reza