Good comments, Candace.
What BB wants to do is discourage abuse of their system. There are some sellers (not you or Arca of course) who are using BB as a free appraisal service so they can make money reselling approved (and unpublished) names.
Over the past few years thousands of brandables have been accepted by BB and never published. This is wasting time and resources that BB could put towards selling our BB listed names.
This abuse of the system also creates an invitation for end users (our customers) to enter the aftermarket and purchase BB curated names at wholesale prices. That is not good for BB or us.
The rating system BB has implemented is intended to 1) acknowledge those sellers who are acting in good faith and publishing most or all of their accepted names and 2) discourage those that are abusing the system at our expense.
Admittedly the system is imperfect and feedback from people like you and Arca etc. is going to help and refine and improve it over time.
Since the BB staff are not active on NPs, the best way to give feedback is via the BB Feedback channel on Slack or via their troubleshooting email:
[email protected]
Thanks for your help!
Thanks for clarifying, Keith. Helps me understand some of BBs thinking behind what they are doing. Some feedback based on your explanation of BB’s intentions:
It doesn’t make sense to penalize the removal of accepted domains that were removed before this actually came to be considered “abuse”. If this metric is going to be used, I think no domains removed before BrandBucket “officially” started to consider it abuse should be counted. It would be better to “reset” every account to 0 (e.g. “good standing”/A), and then start calculating from the day this system was introduced, which I guess would be the day the dashboard score system was introduced. At least then sellers would only be held accountable for behaviour that BB has explicitly said they don’t approve of, and that would be a more logical way to deal with this.
The current system does not do anything to discourage resellers of published names, since such sellers do not remove/drop domains, they simply push them to other accounts, which does not impact your two bottom right corner scores negatively. I also think it’s important for BB to take into consideration that, when the BB reseller market on NP first appeared in 2015, there was a lot of discussion about whether or not this violated BrandBucket’s TOS. BrandBucket came out and approved of the reselling of BB domains on NamePros, and even introduced an account push function to facilitate the reseller market. Now they have backtracked on this position, and considers it an abuse of their system. That’s understandable (it never made sense to me that they approved this practice in the first place), but instead of holding sellers accountable for what turned out to be their own unfortunate decision (by going back and punishing seller’s behaviour that at the time was fully accepted by BB), it would be better for them to just owe up to the fact that they themselves allowed for these various “abuses” of the system, such as allowing the BB reseller market to flourish.
Implementing new regulations now that they have understood that this was a bad idea that led to what they now consider an abuse of their system is fine. But penalizing actions that were previously endorsed by them does not make any sense, and they should only penalize sellers starting from the day they clearly declared that such actions were considered a form of abuse (or just do away with the entire reseller market for a simpler fix - that would also do away for the need to "score and rank" sellers, and penalize/reward them accordingly).
Lastly, the way the scores are calculated is really strict. If you remove more than 50% of your accepted names, then yes you are probably abusing the system. However, under the current system, it looks like if your removed accepted names make up somewhere between 6-8% of your whole portfolio, your account is already considered to be in bad standing (C score or below). My account has been vacillating between C/D score, so I'm just extrapolating that 6-8% is when you first enter bad standing territory. Removing less than 10-20% of accepted names does not strike me as “abuse” at all. They can't expect sellers to agree with 95% of their appraisals/suggested prices. I've removed lots of names for this reason, and just half a day ago I sold a name that I recently removed from my to do list (for close to twice as much the BB suggested price). I would surely have published that name with BB if their suggested price had been double of what they actually suggested, but I was not interested at the price level they suggested. Since sellers are not allowed to set their own prices for domains, besides a 20% increase/decrease, removing accepted names due to price disagreements should probably not be considered "abusing" the system.