information New Afternic & GoDaddy Commission and Pricing Structure

Nitindomains · Mar 10, 2015

Received the following mail just minutes back:-

Hello Member,

Good news! We’ve made it easier for you to list your domain in one place and reach a broader audience of buyers to increase your sales velocity and income.

How are we making things simpler?
• Reduce time spent in pending review, domains are listed immediately after passing the required integrity checks
• Reducing commissions on higher-priced sales to increase your earnings
• Lowering minimum sales price and minimum offer amounts so you can list more domains and earn more money

We’re also taking the guesswork out of promoting your domains. Domains with fast-transfer enabled are promoted through the Afternic Premium Network automatically. Domains without fast-transfer are placed in the Afternic Standard Network.

Know that you can always list a domain without fast-transfer and then enable fast-transfer later. When you do, it jumps from the Standard Network to the Premium Network, which includes 8 of the top 10 registrars, gives you the broadest reach, and exposes your domain to over 75 million monthly search queries.

We also want our fees to be simple and straightforward, so they’re now based on your domain sale price. The three commission tiers look like this:
Sale price of domain >>> Commission fees
$0-$5,000 >>> 20% ($15 minimum)
$5,000-$25,000 >>> $1,000 +15% of amount over $5k
$25,000+ >>> $4,000 + 10% of amount over $25k

To help you list and sell more domains inventory, we lowered our minimum sales prices. The buy now minimum is only $50 (versus $250), and the minimum offer amount decreases to only $20 (from $250).

These changes take place Early April new listings. In the next [3-4] weeks, we’re converting existing listings over.

In a Separate mail notifying the change in Pricing Structure @ GD Aftermarket, the mail states the following:-

Please note we're setting a minimum of $50 for Buy-It-Now Auctions and $100 for Premium listings. We're also setting a $20 minimum listing price for 7-Day Auctions and Offer/Counter-Offer domain listings.

Along with the changes to new listings moving forward, we'll be converting existing listings over to the new system over the next 3 to 4 weeks for an early April launch.

If your domain is below the new minimum offer price, we'll bump the minimum offer up to $20 for 7-Day Auctions and Offer/Counter-Offer listings.
If you have a Buy-It-Now Auction listing priced below $50, we'll switch it to an Offer/Counter-Offer listing with a minimum price of $20.
If you have a domain that's listed as both a Premium Domain and a Buy-It-Now Auction, we'll consolidate it and use the higher of your two price points.

If you don't want us to change your listing prices automatically, simply update your domain pricing manually before March 31st, and it will default to the new listing rules when we roll out the new structure.

Name Trader · Mar 12, 2015

We all know the sweet spot for selling domain is under $5k. For all these sales, commissions have now doubled. There is no way you can paint it any other way.

The New Guy · Mar 12, 2015

I haven't used godaddy because I don't like their escrow approach, but the formula is needlessly complex.

If godaddy set up a flat 15% commission no matter the sales price, market, or network, and backed it up with a true two-way escrow like sedo offers, I'd consider using them because the extra 5% would be worth it for the wider exposure.

m0ss · Mar 12, 2015

Will Godaddy be allowing all the new GTLDS in this new platform?

tonyk2000 · Mar 12, 2015

An idea to list everything in one place is a good idea. What makes me worry is that GD would likely be unable to set the things correctly and to fix all the bugs on-time. How many month did GD require to make Premium Listings shown as available on GD international websites, after GD opened a set of international websites? All premium listings were reported as unavailable on international websites, and it took GD _months_ to fix after we complained a number of times. Or, we already complained and it is was never fixed - some (but not all) premium listings are reported as unavailable on MOBILE godaddy website. Still not fixed after we complained about this about 3 months ago. So, what GD is basically going to do now - is to build a new system based on buggy current one.

carob · Mar 12, 2015

tonyk2000 said:
So, what GD is basically going to do now - is to build a new system based on buggy current one.

That is a very good point.

Currently if you update a Premium Listing price, it takes 24 hours to change on the site. What happens if someone buys it during that period?

This is a risky area since you have authorised GD to just take the domain from your account the second someone pays for it. AFAIK the only safe thing to do (to avoid selling at a previous, lower listing price) is remove the listing. I did that with a domain and it stayed listed. I asked GD what would happen if someone bought it - they said the buyer would get a message saying the domain was no longer avaliable.

GD need to update prices in real time, especially if they are talking about making improvements.

tonyk2000 · Mar 12, 2015

What will happen is exactly the following - we transferred-away a domain with a previously enabled premium listing once (to Uniregistry), listed the domain with DomainNameSales / InternetTraffic under "make offer" model (obviously more expensive). A buyer happened to appear in these same moments and somehow managed to pay godaddy an old fixed price, was promptly refunded as the domain was in fact unavailable (not even regged with GoDaddy), submitted an offer through InternetTraffic contact form, received higher quote and later accused all of us - registrant, broker, GoDaddy in conspiracy against their personality. They were of opinion that InternetTraffic asked GoDaddy not to sell them the domain name, and that GoDaddy promptly complied. Anecdotical case indeed, thanks to GoDaddys misconfigured system

equity78 · Mar 12, 2015

The fact of the matter is you should have one marketplace Afternic and Go Daddy makes little sense, combine it to one entity.

Secondly auctions are not in the registrar path, you should have kept that at 10%, the person using the 7 day auction is looking for different things than the person who wants their names to show up in the registrar path.

No one ever and I mean ever gave you feedback that they would like to pay 20% on auctions vs 10 % SO just stop.

If you can have tiers you can separate Premium Listings and Auctions, two separate and distinct products.

10% for auctions
20% max tiered for premium listings.
Afternic has been an abomination in many ways, here is one fun fact, I have no names parked at Afternic every time I log in you show me traffic and clicks and revenue, nowhere on Afternic does it say what this money has amounted to, and it should be zero. I have had emails don't forget to approve the premium listing with your registrar, opt in, NO email comes.

Change the system, Flippa will continue to eat your lunch for auctions, then you will just have premium listings. So this is a net loss for you guys, plus the people who already have decided to leave Go Daddy.

carob · Mar 12, 2015

Joe Styler said:
We made the changes based on customer feedback and in an effort to help drive more sales for our customers, while making it easier to manage their portfolios. I really think once this gets rolling over the next few months and some planned enhancements are added on that this will be a great help for the domain investor looking to sell a domain.

Hi Joe

Thanks for coming here and explaining the arguments behind the price increases, after the fact.. But this is all defensive firefighting since the email presented this in a way where people could easily misinterpret the commission structure - look how the 35% figure keeps qetting repeated. And no benefits or context were presented.- doesn't it make sense from a presentation viewpoint to implement and explain the improvements, and only then introduce increased or changed charges?

Sedo do provide a lot of info about their sales trends and values, it might help if you offered that too.

Is GD thinking that sellers should set higher prices? Well as it stands the price suggester tool in the Premium Listings thinks I should sell most domains at low XXX - for 19 out of 20 domains my own listing price is 3 or more times what GD suggests.

I don't use GD auctions because it did not sell domains for me, I had to pay to use it, and it was way too complicated and confusing - I just hated it. So I am in the minority here who see the changes as a plus - cutting the 30% on Premium Listings down to 20%, where most others see commissions go from 10% to 20% with no benefit.

equity78 · Mar 12, 2015

carob said:
Hi Joe

Thanks for coming here and explaining the arguments behind the price increases, after the fact.. But this is all defensive firefighting since the email presented this in a way where people could easily misinterpret the commission structure - look how the 35% figure keeps qetting repeated. And no benefits or context were presented.- doesn't it make sense from a presentation viewpoint to implement and explain the improvements, and only then introduce increased or changed charges?

Sedo do provide a lot of info about their sales trends and values, it might help if you offered that too.

Is GD thinking that sellers should set higher prices? Well as it stands the price suggester tool in the Premium Listings thinks I should sell most domains at low XXX - for 19 out of 20 domains my own listing price is 3 or more times what GD suggests.

I don't use GD auctions because it did not sell domains for me, I had to pay to use it, and it was way too complicated and confusing - I just hated it. So I am in the minority here who see the changes as a plus - cutting the 30% on Premium Listings down to 20%, where most others see commissions go from 10% to 20% with no benefit.

Carob I agree with you on the 30 to 20 but most were listing with Afternic and getting around the 30 anyway, I have had 20% for months, just selected premium at Afternic and in the Go Daddy registrar path.

carob · Mar 12, 2015

equity78 said:
Carob I agree with you on the 30 to 20 but most were listing with Afternic and getting around the 30 anyway, I have had 20% for months, just selected premium at Afternic and in the Go Daddy registrar path.

Hi that is true but you have to wait 60 days for a new reg on that path - so you have to rememember to come back in 60 days and jump through hoops.

I agree Afternic is a mess, I think I'll give up on them and just focus on DNS. I just don't have time to wrestle with buggy platforms and risky listings.

tonyk2000 · Mar 12, 2015

"buggy platforms and risky listings" - well said. This is exactly why we use only Premium Listings and not auctions or Afternic. And even with Premium Listings there are constant bugs, not all of them are even mentioned in this thread as it is not a GD support ticket. Just one more bug - once GoDaddys check printing system stopped to print destination country name on checks/envelopes. The checks returned to GD as undeliverable. And even our Premium Account manager was never able to make a 100%-guaranteed statement that this bug is/was fixed. So we had to remove higher-priced listings and are currently using paypal to receive payments...

weblaunch · Mar 12, 2015

The new GD auction pricing structure will definitely drive away many sellers who deal with low-priced domains. If you were to sell a domain for $20 with the new fees, you'd end up with a whopping $5 net proceeds after the $15 minimum fee, whereas formerly it was $15 (with the $5 min. fee). If your cost of the domain that sold at $20 was $5, you'd be looking at a profit of 0%, compared to 200% before. (GD was wise enough to raise the minimum offer price from $10 to $20; otherwise, you'd end up LOSING $5 for every domain you sell at $10 with the new min.).

It's interesting to see whether or not the new prices will have enough of a negative impact, if any, on the GD marketplace to force them to change them back, but at any rate, the abrupt and drastic increases can't be good for those who tailor their business models to GD's rates.

tomcarl · Mar 12, 2015

tomcarl · Mar 12, 2015

weblaunch said:
It's interesting to see whether or not the new prices will have enough of a negative impact, if any, on the GD marketplace to force them to change them back, but at any rate, the abrupt and drastic increases can't be good for those who tailor their business models to GD's rates.

It will, without a doubt. People will always complain about higher fees, but when their fee structure literally makes many selling models impossible to turn a profit, people have no choice but to list elsewhere.

I'm sure there's thousands of domains sold in the $15-30 range, not anymore.

weblaunch · Mar 12, 2015

tomcarl said:
It will, without a doubt. People will always complain about higher fees, but when their fee structure literally makes many selling models impossible to turn a profit, people have no choice but to list elsewhere.

The reason I'm not so sure that the changes will have a negative impact on their marketplace revenues is that the changes will favor GD's expiring domain auctions at the expense of third-party sellers. But it's also true that many of these third-party sellers are also buyers of GD expiring auctions who look to later flip their purchases for small profits through the GD auctions. I'm sure GD has enough smart people to crunch numbers to forcast the viability of the pricing changes. I think all it takes for the price hikes to backfire is for another major player to step in and offer an auction marketplace that charges only 5%-10% commission on auction sales.

Joe Styler · Mar 12, 2015

I really can't thank everyone enough for the honest feedback. I really appreciate it. We have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on the back end to strengthen the platform and remove the issues that some of you have brought up as buggy. It's not something very transparent when you look at the site but it is happening behind the scenes. We have some plans for changes to continue and many of the things brought up as suggestions are in place on our roadmap. Please feel free to bring them directly to me and I will help make sure they are seriously considered.
Some things we are currently working on that were suggested to us are allowing you to add domains to your watchlist on the auction in bulk, and allowing you to download a list of names for sale which will also include the number of views your listing has had so you don't have to look at them one by one.
I can also say that on the Afternic side there has been and will continue to be improvements made to the infrastructure of the site which will allow for better customer experience in the future.
The next year will have some great changes around the Aftermarket so stay tuned and feel free to reach out.
I am normally at all the domain conferences and have been for the past 5 or 6 years so if any of you have not met me and would like to face to face please let me know. I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Lyon face to face for the first time at the last namescon.

Nerevar · Mar 13, 2015

What about the domain extensions that did not qualify previously for Premium listings: info, biz etc? Will they be converted to premium listings if listed as "buy now"?

thekiller · Mar 13, 2015

For example on sale of $4000 we were deducted %10 or $400. And now we will be deducted 20% or $800. @Joe Styler what do you think? is it positive change?

Most of us there have sale under $5K and you have doubled the commissions.

Domaingel · Mar 13, 2015

I at least want to see an improvement in how premium listings are promoted. Currently, if anyone tries to register a domain on GoDaddy that is not available, they are provided with $10 new tld options. The average person isn't going to dig further and do a customized search to see if there are any similar .com available to purchase.

Domain Shane · Mar 13, 2015

The fact that you have to include a calculator means its is not simple enough. The problem is this. Godaddy has the scale to make it the cheapest, easiest, and fastest way to auction names and instead you blew it and made it more complicated and raised the prices. Congratulations to Flippa and Namejet. They just added customers and didn't have to do a thing.

PS your direct links to auctions don't work in mobile. Between my affiliate links to your "you've been outbid, bid again" emails, none lead to the auctions as your responsive site breaks all links.

Joe Styler said:
Hi everyone. Thanks for the feedback on the commission changes that are planned. There are many reasons for this but the main driving force is feedback from customers and an effort to help improve the marketplace so that more sales can happen for the domain investor. In the cases of our highest sales velocity channels (the places we sell the most names the fastest for our customers) we lowered commissions. So GoDaddy premium listings and Afternic Premium promotion are both being lowered.

I will post what I put in reply to Abdul's blog comments below. I think it helps explain the reasoning behind the changes in part, although I could go on for pages and explain where we are going and how this is part of a bigger foundational move to help sellers improve their return on investment.

I appreciate that the commission fees are a bit confusing, but we created them in an effort to charge less for higher value sales vs. a flat commission structure. We are planning on releasing an inline commission calculator shortly after we release the new changes. In many cases you will see that commissions have gone down instead of up. For example our premium domain name sales channel currently has the highest rate of sales for our sellers and we charge a flat 30% commission. Afternic currently charges a flat 20% on the premium promotion level sales which also provide the highest sale rate. There will now be a lower fee for any sales over $5k on that channel and a lower fee for any sales on GoDaddy premium domains.

We made the changes based on customer feedback and in an effort to help drive more sales for our customers, while making it easier to manage their portfolios. I really think once this gets rolling over the next few months and some planned enhancements are added on that this will be a great help for the domain investor looking to sell a domain.

The goal of this change wasn’t to raise commissions but to flatten them across Afternic and GoDaddy in all the various listing possibilities that currently exist. This will allow us to do several important things to help sellers:
-Managing domains is simpler. Whether you have 50 or 5,0000 names we all know how much of a chore it can be to list your names on several venues for sale to make sure you are reaching all your potential buyers. Opting in to all the channels and setting various price points depending on what you would like to net as a result of the sale is time consuming enough but add in adjusting prices on existing listings or removing names and you can see how things really can add up.
The commission change is part of a plan to allow you to list in one place and have your name show up in the best way possible in front of potentially millions of buyers on a regular basis. In the near future we will work behind the scenes to get your name out in front of as many people as possible throughout the entire Afternic network and all you will need to do is set one price in one place, not the 4 commission structures currently in place and three listing places you need to list at and update.
-Selling names will be more effective. By flattening commissions we can more easily feed your names to partner registrars through Afternic and check to make sure your names show up in the best possible sales channels which will result in higher sales opportunities and conversions for you as a seller than the current listing process. Again this will be done by us automatically after you set a price on your domain when you list it for sale.
A good example of this a way we will help optimize your sales opportunities is as follows. Say you buy a domain that just dropped or win an expiring domain auction. The name will have a 60 day ICANN transfer lock on it which will not allow it to fast transfer and that precludes it from being listed in a couple sales channels. Currently you simply cannot list the names for 60 days if you choose those settings when trying to list the domain. The new plan would be to have you set it for sale and then we would list the domain name for sale on any channel we have that allows for a domain push or account change rather than a transfer and then after 60 days get the process rolling automatically for your name to be opted into the wider network. This would give most people a substantial amount of time where they can have their names listed for sale compared to the current listing processes. It also makes it easier to manage for people doing this already manually in that you no longer have to keep track of which names can be listed where and how on your own, we will check and automatically provide the maximum exposure we can for your names.
We are also doing away with the requirement to have an auctions membership to list a domain name for sale so that once you list a name it can be automatically listed for sale in auctions as well as premium regardless of your membership. This is going to cost us money and save you money but the goal is trying to help you get your name presented in as many places as possible with as little management on your part as possible freeing up more of your time while guaranteeing that your name is presented to every possible buyer we can get it in front of on over 100 partners with over 75 million searches a month.
My response is getting to be too long so I will cut it short but I am really excited about the changes that in many cases will bring lower fees for our customers and add more sales opportunities. We are doing this in an effort to help sellers maximize their sales opportunities. If there is anything I can do to help anyone with their sales please feel free to reach out. jstyler at godaddy

Joe Styler · Mar 13, 2015

Nerevar: There are plans to allow other tlds into the Premium Channel. This standardization of the commission project is foundational to allow for other future changes such as that.

thekiller: I hope you will try the premium channel which was lowered from 30% to 20% and has a much higher sales rate.

Domaingel: The domain registration consistently changes and we did have alternative premium results up for a while and may again but we do switch things consistently for testing.

Shane: It is more complex than a straight commission. We considered that before changing but thought saving sellers more money on higher dollar transactions was worth the confusion over a straight 20%.
Can you email me an example of the affiliate link that's not working so I can get it over to the developers?

Domain Shane · Mar 13, 2015

Joe,

I will email you because I think we need to talk more often but go to any direct link to an auction on your phone and you will see. Go to http://domainshane.com/domainshanes-big-list-domain-name-auction-picks-thursday-march-5th-2015-2/ and pick Paulsen. The link works perfectly unless on mobile. Even your twitter feed links @godaddyauctions don't work on mobile. It's been like that 12 months now and nobody has ever noticed.

Joe Styler · Mar 13, 2015

I see that now thanks for bringing it up. I will see what I can do.

Name Trader · Mar 13, 2015

Joe Styler said:
Shane: It is more complex than a straight commission. We considered that before changing but thought saving sellers more money on higher dollar transactions was worth the confusion over a straight 20%.

For most of us here, whose bread and butter is selling domains <$5k, you've thrown us under the bus. It's a straight 100% increase in commissions. We don't actually care what commissions you charge over $5k. It seems your new commission structure benefits the big sellers over the little sellers.

Now we probably move to your Premium Listings because we get better monetization, for exactly the same commission of 20%. Why would anybody just want to list on your auctions anymore when Premium Listings are the same price. You better be prepared for your volume increases in Premium Listings. Whereas we ate the 10% commission, we are not going to eat the 20% commission. But we maybe increase our prices between 20-40% (because we want something out of this sale too). Which will probably involve less sales completions. Also, you are probably going to severely damage Make Offer pricing with this move. At least for the initiated. And I think single handedly you have increased prices for domains sold under $5k, which doesn't gel with your marketing posture of being in the corner of everyman/woman.

Name Trader · Mar 13, 2015

You also need a much better automated system of recognizing when a domain has changed hands (or dropped). Else you are likely to have on your hands, lots of disputes where people have purchased domains which are not owned by the domain lister anymore. This is in dire need already.

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