Yes I said Dan competitor. So I am talking landing pages only. No additional marketing.
First of all, thanks for sharing all your thoughts on this matter. I appreciate it. We're constantly reviewing all the feedback provided here by you and other sellers to see how we can position ourselves to make everyone happy. Although I can't promise you anything, we will certainly try and see if there's anything we can do about our commission.
I also wanted to say that I highly respect all our competitors. Everyone started at the same place and they're all doing what they need to in order to succeed just like you and I. It's often hard for those on the outside to truly appreciate the trials and tribulations of running a business like this. Selling a few domains on your own website with little traffic is very different than running a large marketplace that's being bombarded with millions of conflicting opinions. From buyers who think domains should be worth no more than $10, to sellers who think they know how to sell based on some random piece of advice they read on a forum, to malicious people who are constantly trying to exploit the business. The larger you get, the bigger the problems become.
Just the other day we had a "buyer" deposit a fraudulent check for $65k that we had to waste time and money sorting out. Then there was this seller who was trying to siphon money through stolen credit cards. All of these issues cost real time and money to resolve. Most of these problems are tackled behind the scenes so on the outside everything appears peachy. My point is all of this is taken care of for you behind the scenes in return for the commission you pay. Even then a huge chunk of sellers constantly hop around from one marketplace to another wasting all the effort spent marketing their domains. So it's not as simple as commission - processing fee = profit.
Now I understand what you're saying in regards to providing a lander-only service but my question to you is why? Why wouldn't you want your domains to be marketed? In your own words, isn't it all about sales at the end of the day?
I don't personally agree with your approach of just using a landing page alone but if that's what you really want then why not just use Efty? It's 0% commission and a small monthly fee that's equivalent to paying for your own web hosting. Why would you want to use any marketplace at all in that case?
Efty + Dan do have payment plans.
I thought you had to pay the full 9% (+2% CC now) at DAN for payment plans based on
this post.
Squadhelp do actually protect against Chargebacks.
I thought they didn't based on
this article. Maybe things have changed.
I am not aware of any of those charging extra fees to withdraw payment. Can you clarify which ones you think do?
I may be wrong but
this post makes it seem like there's a 4% fee for PayPal payouts over $2k.
I think you can get cc fees at around 2% for high vol, bank wire costs less
Then you can charge 5-6% and still be profitable.
Can you tell me where we can get CC processing for 2%? As I mentioned above we pay 3-5% in transaction fees right now to our processor Stripe (2.9% CC + 0.4% chargeback + 1% international) and payouts (1% Payoneer, 0.5-1% wire, etc). Bank wires are rare and buyers typically don't use them for majority of the transactions especially since a lot sales happen through monthly installment plans.
Even if we did no additional marketing at all, there are still operational costs to think about like software development, web hosting, customer support, taxes, etc. On the support front, we offer concierge service which Escrow.com charges an additional 3.25% for (in fact they charge you a total of 9.6% for the same service we provide without even a landing page).
Keep in mind these aren't automated transactions. Each one can easily take 15-20 mins of human time (i.e. transferring the domain from the seller into company's account, transferring it to the buyer, processing payouts, sales/support inquiries, etc).
If if get the buyer through my lander I do not want that to lose even 10-20% chance of sale. I bring the lead I want the best possible chance of a sale. Traffic leakage is deal breaker for me.
I don't think you're seeing the full picture. Sure, there's a 10-20% chance of you losing the sale but there's also a 10-20% chance of you gaining one that you wouldn't have otherwise. It works both ways and only benefits you in the long run especially if you have high quality names (i.e. if a buyer landed on a crappy name and saw your quality name under it, they'll buy yours instead). So unless you have crappy names, you will actually benefit with this feature.
Let me ask you this, when was the last time you spent a few thousand dollars or even a couple hundred dollars without Googling for alternatives? Your comment makes it seem like buyers who spend their hard earned cash are stupid.
We actually talked to real buyers and they told us that they're already aware of other marketplaces and alternatives. Go ahead and type in a basic keyword like "domain marketplace" into Google and tell me what you see. Do you think buyers who are about to drop a couple grand don't already do that?
Heck, if they're about to buy an aftermarket domain, they generally already have an account at a registrar where they'll transfer the domain. All the buyer needs to do is use the registrar's search bar to find an alternative which'll cost them 250X less if available.
From our experience, buyers aren't buying domains from your own website or WL marketplace because they're "locked in". They're buying them because they're attached to that specific name. And if that's the case then showing other domains under yours isn't going to make one bit of a difference to them. But the additional traffic you'll receive from it may make a huge difference to you (bigger audience = higher probability of a sale for you).
Quality has and will always wins.
Personally I have no interest in brandable marketplaces or logos. They tend to favour a small group of insiders who benefit more.
This is exactly why we're taking the hybrid approach where you can list any domain you want and still be able to take advantage of brandable landers. In fact, we're the only marketplace that does this right now for 10% commission (the other one charges 25%). We believe that brandability is the future of domaining. If you don't believe me,
compare the search trend of the keywords "business names" vs "domain names".
This is the issue. Favours certain sellers over others currently.
We have something in the pipeline that I think will help you feel better about certain sellers being favored more than others. Stay tuned!
It's not a one of the other situation. You can have it as an option that can be turned on or off depending on the sellers preference.
If enough sellers want this then we'll certainly consider it. Though one of our goals is also to keep things simple so if this option doesn't really benefit anyone than it would be pointless to add it and unnecessarily create confusion. So far I haven't seen much interest from others and/or enough data to help justify that it works. As I mentioned above, it actually helps sellers who have
quality names.
2-3% of millions per month in sales. Think big.
Sure, but 0% of millions per month in sales is $0. If we're already spending up to 5% in transaction fees then based on your math 5% + 2-3% of profit would put us in the 7-8% range without doing any marketing at all. At that point why not just spend the extra 2% and have us market your names to a broader audience? Especially in an industry that is very supply heavy with nowhere near as much demand (20+ million aftermarket domains vs 1-2% average STR).
Offer a better product at better prices and domain investors with large portfolios will jump ship.
It's very easy to switch providers. Key thing here is better product. Alter seems to have done most of that hard work already in that regard, so well positioned.
Agreed, but in this industry most platforms have already capped out on features. In other words, adding more features isn't going to give you more sales. But doing marketing will.
While the current setup (not having a buyer account) will work technically, having an account at Alter can subconsciously confirm that Alter is indeed a solid company. Especially when it comes to installment plans and higher lease amounts, DNS changes, invoicing, it seems nice from the buyer's perspective to be able to log in to their own environment. I also think that repeat purchases can be stimulated for larger companies that often have several projects needed to be named.
All great points! We'll continue to gather feedback from buyers and act accordingly.
I think most of us have a certain percentage of lower quality names in portfolio. But I personally will not think of ever listing these names on Alter. I try to pick only my better names in each price category for Alter. As soon as I notice that low quality and extreme cheap domains become part of the listings, I will not appreciate it as a seller. It's not good for the reference point for potential buyers either.
Makes sense though the challenge we're still having is that there's no consensus on what good quality actually means so every seller draws their own line based on the quality of their portfolio. IOW, everyone essentially thinks they own high quality names. You can clearly see this in a number of posts created after our new direction announcement. I think we have a way to fix this though by improving our search algo and letting buyers decide on quality, rather than sellers. Stay tuned!
My suggestion is to first show some closely related domains from the same seller with high priority, followed by other relevant domains from other members.
Indeed. This is already on our radar. Just waiting for a larger inventory so that the relevance makes sense. Right now we don't have a lot of closely related names so the results aren't that useful.
I think if you want to be the go-to marketplace for all domain investors, then you could support these low-quality names, too. The truth is, there are domainers with junk names
Yes I think domainers with large portfolios have mixed names and if you want to attract all domainers then you could support these junk names, too. The low quality names would appear only at the end of the search results anyway. You don't need to advertise the lower quality names.
I think this may help sellers who own low quality names but can't see it helping buyers. As I mentioned above, buyers wouldn't be interested in names like BossManCatalog.xyz no matter how cheap they are. At that point they might as well add/swap keywords or just buy an available extension for $10. Unless you're looking to use Alter to buy/sell names on a wholesale basis? Even then the profit margin would be impossible to work with unless we introduce a minimum fee. Wasn't Afternic's minimum sale price $250 for a long time before they lowered it?
International wire transfer is expensive, that's why there are services like wise.com. But these global payment providers have local bank accounts and they make the wire transfer payments cheap to customers.
I see what you mean. Agreed, we'll certainly explore this and whatever else ultimately helps buyers buy more domains.
