I started building a BB portfolio by accident about a year ago. I bought a lot of names from a person on NamePros and one of them was a BB listed name so I had to open and account so that the listing could be moved to me. I felt upon looking at the site that is quite compelling for an end user to look for a name for a company in a way that they could picture graphically. It is a lot more appealing to the eyes than a list of names on a sheet.
So I started taking names and submitting them for approval. As well as buying previous expired BB listings or buying some from others they were trying to liquidate before considering renewing or dropping
Lesson learned - Quality names matter and over time I will part ways with some of the lower quality names I purchased from the expired lists that were previously BB approved. So that being said my overall STR on the platform is probably lower than most. And in the last few months I have been adding many new higher quality names. So I am sure my STR will definitely improver over time.
But I will share with you my stats from the platform so far. As of today I have been a BB seller for 44 weeks and 5 days. I have had 5 sales on the platform.
1) Name was a two word name purchased on BB Slack channel from another domainer I bought a lot of names and cost worked out to $14.06 per name. Sold this domain for $10075, my take after BB fees $7555
2) Name was purchased on Godaddy Expired Auctions. 1 word with bot appended to the end of it. Name cost $284.47 on GD. Sold for $4155 my take after BB fees $2935.
3) Name was purchased Godaddy closeout for $12.47 with renewal fee 1 word name with extra R at end. Sold on BB for $3230 my take after BB fees $2260.
4) Name was purchased from another BB member on their slack channel who was making decision to renew or drop. Made up name. Paid $12. Sold for $1795 my take after fee's $1055. This was an older name and older names prior to mid 2019 had a logo fee in addition to commission. The fee follows the domain from owner to owner if it stays on the platform. The original lister could set fee of $100-$500 bucks. Seems crazy to elect more that $100 but many original listers did. (Funny not really any quality difference in a $100 fee one or $500 fee one.) But this one had $200 logo fee on top of the 30% commission. Hence the low payout.
5) Name purchased for $10 on DropCatch. Single word domain with appended with sy at end. Sold on BB for $1195 My take after BB fees $735. This one had a logo fee of $100 hence the higher than 30% commission.
So all in all I have 5 sales and collected $14,540 in pocket after fee's from BB. During this time my portfolio size increased rapidly at first. But mainly from buying less that desirable names that i will eventually liquidate off if they go unsold after 1 renewal. But Brandbucket shows my sales rate at .82% STR with any average portfolio size of 608 names. How does this compare to other sellers. 92% of sellers have a higher STR than this according to my dashboard. However, my revenue shows that only 18% of sellers have earned more revenue. Don't let this make you think that people don't make a lot. A small group of people have very large portfolios they have built of years.
So the take away for me is as I parse out the less than desirable names and increase my domain count at same time, my STR will increase. I don't see BrandBucket as the end all of places to sell names but they definitely are doing it well with Brandables. Could I have sold these items on DAN, EPIK, AFTERNIC and more. I bet I could have, may or may not have been just as fast. I will never know. But I think people that think all good names will be found by landers are wrong, many times people looking for a name will visit sites like SquadHelp, BrandBucket, Afternic, Sedo, Uniregistry and others. For some its mind numbing looking at endless pages of names, many with make offer and they head ache of back and forth negotiating for the end user. BrandBucket, BrandPa, SquadHelp and other make this process visually appealing to those looking for a name. For some this is the deal maker. And most of these platforms will work with end user on Logo redesign to meet their requirements if the logo is not quite right for them.
SquadHelp on the other hand I am still on the fence. I only have 61 premium names on the market place. Getting names approved is some what of a ridiculous process. While it may not be so, It feels like there is no rhyme or reason to how they approve things. As one example they will approve almost any 4L even non pronounceable ones and no mater what you request for price upon submission if they approve it it will almost always come back lower than your request. As a seller Squadhelp feels like they look at coins for reviews as a viable revenue stream for profit they have every way to Sunday to have you pay coins for something. While, BrandBucket uses the review cost to offset cost to do unbiased reviews, and pay for logo creation labor.
I have 0 sales on the platform thus far, but I will try to get to 100 names on there and give it year. Before throwing the towel in on the experience. They do have some interesting new things coming with the new white label program that may or may not be a game changer in the industry only time will tell.
SquadHelp provides pretty good stats on your portfolio and as a platform if you are silver member tier or above.
Help on SH seems to be more rigid, not that people are not nice. But they give you boiler plate responses and if that doesn't solve issue its always we get back to you which may take awhile. BB on the other hand seems to be there for the seller if need be including the owner who is actively engaged in what is going on in the company.
SH has forums. They seem hit or miss and used by very few people on a regular basis. BB uses slack for its forum for sellers with many actively engaged sellers bartering with one another on names and having discussions with each other on name submissions, rejections and many other topics.
SH has policy where you can assign the name over to them and you will get a diminish return I think first year they will pay you 25% of the sale, which goes down to 20% by year 3 and on. But they own name if you elect this option and you just collect residual payouts if it ever sells but they pay all renewals. Not for me, but if you were going to let it drop. Would definitely be worth pushing to them.
As previously stated if you use a coin to have name reviewed on SH and it is published as a premium you are allowed to sell it on afternic also. However you will owe SH the difference of SH approved commission rate less Afternic rate. But in all cases a minimum of 5% I wish BB would allow this also. But both BB and SH syndicate listing with your approval on SEDO. and SH also syndicates them onto Flippa.
BB now has a published liquidate price on every name on the platform in you Dash Panel. If you decide to let a name drop at renewal time you could instead give it to BB for the liquidate amount and they would give you a small sum of money and take your name. They don't offer a residual payout on this method so in this area the SH method wins out.
BB has a small amount of sellers with a large percentage of the published names. But not as easy to see as SH. SquadHelp shows the top few sellers, If you click on each one to see portfolio you will see that the top 15 people have over 25% of names on platform.
So now I am looking at BrandPa, and considering putting 100 names on their platform to gauge how that platform pays off. I really don't know much about them other than you can get an instant appraisal for a name and it will tell if name is not a good fit for market place but ultimately you set price and submit name for listing and pay $8.00 for logo and listing creation. So you are making a financial commitment to list with them. But, really not much more that SH. If SH approves only 10% names submitted by there documentation then you are technically paying $10 for 1 submission. (ie. 10 coins to review 10 names to get one approved.) My dashboard shows 13.89% approval rating. While I am closer to 30% on BB. So in the grand scheme of things $8.00 really is not much more costly than paying for reviews on other platforms. But do people really sell names any were close to the STR quoted on the platforms to potential name sellers. BrandPa suggests they have an overall platform STR of 6.6% If this is true that is awesome!!! But I would like to see some some BrandPa sellers show some stats. I accept name quality also affects STR. So please if your a BrandPa seller and are willing to share stats on the platform I would like to hear / see them.
The argument about commissions these platforms charge vs go it alone or other methods. Yes all 3 require exclusivity to listing on their platform with exception in certain circumstances SH will let you list on Afternic after again to pay commission differnece. But these platforms to have the costs to make logos for every name posted many just like all market places will never sell or take years to get to sell. So they offset their costs to provide escrow services, accept credit card fraud, create logos, and maintain servers to provide the market place to sell names specifically ones that are Brandable. As previously stated if one of these can get me to 3-4% sell through rate then I really don't care about the higher commission. But if they only average 1% and I get there on other platforms with lower commissions then obviously the added commission would not be worth it. For me time will tell, but I see these types of name as a numbers game. You build a portfolio of size with a decent STR and then reap the rewards for years to come.
But like I am sure you have done in the past, you went to Sedo, Afternic or another market to list a name you acquired and couldn't because previous owner had it listed and never pulled the listing down up on sell of name. Now you have to go through hoops to prove to marketplace that you have domain in your registrar account. These brandable market places sell domains primarily at BIN prices. So if people have paid for names only to find out market could not provide domain to them would be bad for business and would cost repeat customer from returning. Having domains point to name servers, is an easy way for them to constant verify domain is system and available for transfer. They also have deleting time thresholds of x amount of days to allow them to reap any benefits from sells where they have in discussion or have served landing pages to others in the past.
I do think it would be fair for all these market places to allow listing in other markets as SH does with Aternic provided I provide the commission difference, because at end of day if name sells both platform and seller make money. So the more eyes on the name the better odds are of selling it.
