Unwanted Afternic listing request

Joe Styler said:

What is much more likely to occur is someone will see the listing with us and contact us to buy the domain. We will then discover the name cannot be delivered to the buyer and take action against the seller and inform the buyer the name cannot be sold - because as far as we know it cannot. At which time we will let the buyer know their options for other names we have available from other customers that are similar to the one they were interested in.

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I don't see any value in that, the domain shouldn't be listed in the first place. Now I suspect other deals at Godaddy have been tainted by this approach... Most of us have offer pages or BIN prices listed, so it's obvious the domain is for sale. I don't see the value in offering alternative names, either. What I suspect you are saying, Joe, is that this is acceptable at Afternic?

DanSanchez said:

I don't see any value in that, the domain shouldn't be listed in the first place. Now I suspect other deals at Godaddy have been tainted by this approach... Most of us have offer pages or BIN prices listed, so it's obvious the domain is for sale. I don't see the value in offering alternative names, either. What I suspect you are saying, Joe, is that this is acceptable at Afternic?

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What I am saying is that if a domain is listed by someone else for his account he should let us know and not assume it will result in a sale for him when we have no way of knowing who he is or what names he owns or has listed. We also don't have any way of knowing if a for sale lander is put up by the current owner of the domain or someone else unless the domain name is listed with us somehow. If it is we would try and salvage the sale with the legitimate owner and take action against the bad seller. In this case we do not know the domain and the owner in this thread will not give it to us and stated they have nothing listed with us therefore we have no way of knowing who he is or how to salvage a sale for him.

Of course we try to close a deal on the name a buyer calls in on for our customer, every time, stop end of story. In his particular case we don't know who poster and what his domain is and he is not listing anything with us. We have no way to help him sell his domain if someone calls in. Therefore we would very likely be in a position where we would close a sale on this particular name and only after it sold discover the name wasn't available. So we would sell the name the buyer wanted and not be able to deliver it. This is not a good situation. We would take action against the seller at that point. We would also then return to the buyer and refund their money and let them know we cannot deliver the domain because the seller does not own it. We would then look and see if the name was listed with us in another way or registered with us etc to try and complete the sale - the poster said it's not. I am referring to his unique case and saying simply he should not assume a sale of his name will happen as a result of someone else listing a name he owns for sale on our platform.

I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories (not in our specific business at least), but... Since afternic always had ownership verification problem, allowing anybody to list anything that is not yet listed, and asking for verifications only to enable fast transfer delivery of any sold domain as an extra config option (from which requirement some supersellers are likely free, as there were reports of domains being both sold and transferred without real owners approval) - and this also happened before GD bought Afternic - should this be considered as a knowingly implemented feature? Maybe to force more and more domain owners to signup and add their domains to disallow other non-supersellers to add them instead? Did we see a single evidence of somebodys account being locked for constantly adding domains they do not own (or not removing domains they no longer own)? I mean that an occasional typo .com vs .co is one thing, but mass and frequent wrong domains is something else.

We do take action when this happens regardless of the size of the customer. Allowing this to happen gives a bad customer experience for everyone involved and it is not in our best interest to allow that.

Joe, what "taking action" means in this context? May it be "Hello John Doe, please do not add somedomain.com anymore as we receive frequent complaints about this particular domain from its owner. You added it 5 times in a raw and we deleted it 5 times in a raw. We still love you. Yours, Afternic".
Yes I'm little sarcastic here, sorry. Didn't mean to offend anybody. The above sequence of numerous adds-deletes happened some time ago with one of my not-for-sale domains which I therefore had no reasons to add to my Afternic account.
Which also shows that a generic recommendation to open afternic account and to add domains is not always workable.

Joe Styler said:

This person is aware that their domain is listed. He should give us the name so we can take care of it and he can list it himself. We do various checks on domains that are listed and we do take action against people selling domains they do not own.

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Sorry Joe, this is not an acceptable solution for users who are not on Afternic. You cannot put the onus on domain owners for false/fraudulent listings on the Afternic marketplace, ESPECIALLY if the domain owner is NOT a Afternic user. Why are you stoically ignoring this last point? When does Afternic's responsibility start for the accuracy of listings on the marketplace?

Joe Styler said:

This person is aware that their domain is listed.

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What if the domain owner is not aware?

Joe Styler said:

What I am saying is that if a domain is listed by someone else for his account he should let us know and not assume it will result in a sale for him when we have no way of knowing who he is or what names he owns or has listed. We also don't have any way of knowing if a for sale lander is put up by the current owner of the domain or someone else unless the domain name is listed with us somehow. If it is we would try and salvage the sale with the legitimate owner and take action against the bad seller. In this case we do not know the domain and the owner in this thread will not give it to us and stated they have nothing listed with us therefore we have no way of knowing who he is or how to salvage a sale for him.

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Joe,

We're not concerned about "salvaging" the sale. The concern you seem to be ignoring is how is this listing being allowed? Are you saying that Afternic has NO way to check and verify the ownership a domain being listed by a seller (I'm talking about a generic listing and not the domain that originated this thread).

anantj said:

What if the domain owner is not aware?

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@Joe Styler your system is seriously flawed and for 20% cut, we expect security.
How many domain owners are unaware, someone is selling their names?
And I emailed service@ and never heard for days, phoned and situation was rectified in minutes.
So emailing can take to long to get a response, namesilo 30 minutes on sunday night.
Daddy has lots of money, spend some fixing up broken afternic

I did post the name early in this thread, but it was just in a run of text, so it was probably missed. I added it to my sig to make things easier now,

Here is the Afternic listing -
https://www.afternic.com/search?k=JointCarInsurance&tld=com

and here is the Name Silo landing page.
http://www.jointcarinsurance.com/

I appreciate that the name may be overpriced. I pushed it up as a result of all the publicity to see what happened.

There is a lot of negativity in this thread, but some positives have come out of it.

The Name Silo domain protection features seem to be working.
Afternic appears to contact the registrar to confirm the validity of the listing, but doesn't honour the promise to remove the name if no confirmation is received. It would seem to be a simple matter to rectify this. Maybe they should seek confirmation before a listing goes live.

anantj said:

What if the domain owner is not aware?

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This one is.

anantj said:

Joe,

We're not concerned about "salvaging" the sale. The concern you seem to be ignoring is how is this listing being allowed? Are you saying that Afternic has NO way to check and verify the ownership a domain being listed by a seller (I'm talking about a generic listing and not the domain that originated this thread).

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We do checks the most robust being done in conjunction with your registrar of record when opting in to the fast transfer network you get an email from the company they are registered with after we and they check the name. There are over 10 million domains listed on the platform at any given time, there are only a small number % wise of domains that have issues.

Joe Styler said:

This one is.

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Does that make it right?

But anyway, you are not going to answer this question as you've sidestepped it every time this has been asked. Your silence on this question says a lot though

anantj said:

Does that make it right?

But anyway, you are not going to answer this question as you've sidestepped it every time this has been asked. Your silence on this question says a lot though

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I did answer. I said with over 10 million names listed on our platform sometimes names slip through the ownership checks but they are edge cases and rare in the grand scheme of things.