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strategy Don't use min offer on your names. At all. Just BIN.

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twiki

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I know it might sound counter-intuitive for many, but this is what I have been doing this year.

And I'm not going back.

Reason:

I've discovered that using min offer does NOT increase my revenue
. At all. It probably won't improve yours as well, unless you are really unsure about the price and you just don't want to lose the sales by overpricing. I always know what the price needs to be. I also do test pricing a lot on different names.

Still, I suggest using BIN only. (note; I make my min offer the same as BIN).

So what happens when I use min offer?

1) Min offer makes impulse buying far less frequent. That's bad. My domains get snatched fast if there's no min. I use decent pricing usually (not expensive, not dirt cheap), so there's no other option left but to buy or go away. Does not leave them time to think. They have to snatch it now.

2) If they offer less money and I accept, I end up eating a 25-50% loss. Why would I do that? This actually kills all the margin in most domainer portfolios, due to renewal cost.

3) 3 out of 4 of the cases when I accept, get unpaid. You just give them more time to think over. Don't give them time to think over. Ever.

4) Buys under 3k are impulse buys anyway. I want that. I want them to have buyers remorse tomorrow morning after they bought the domain already, have no problems with that.

5) Above 3k, it is said you should use min offer but again I see this as pointless. There you either use BIN or don't use BIN at all. Cause they will contact the brokers via Afternic phone number anyway; and ask for a lower price anyway if they want to . Otherwise they just buy via BIN and that's what I want.

6) Edit: It also gives buyers the opportunity to get it cheap, especially to those that would have paid the full price anyway.

For $10k+ domains only, I'd recommend having just a min offer so you can do some research before replying to them and up the price accordingly.

TL;DR; Ever since I switched to BIN only and no min offer, my conversions have increased a lot, no more unpaid purchases to get you aggravated and no hassle.

Good luck selling!
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Glad somebody gets it.

It’s playing games!

Be straight, least amount of games as possible

Samer
 
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By what margin has your STR increased after removing make offer? Also, what do you think about BIN only with payment installments available?

A CEO of a brandable marketplace (I forget which one) recently said that buy now + make offer performs worse than either just buy now or make offer because it creates pricing confusion in the buyer and also eliminates impulse buy.
So he pretty much agrees with you.
 
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By what margin has your STR increased after removing make offer? Also, what do you think about BIN only with payment installments available?

A CEO of a brandable marketplace (I forget which one) recently said that buy now + make offer performs worse than either just buy now or make offer because it creates pricing confusion in the buyer and also eliminates impulse buy.
So he pretty much agrees with you.

Hard to say exactly how much it increased but at least 40% or possibly 50% extra.

Increase was like double on my domains priced lower than $300. See my series of BIN sales reported.

I don't offer installment anymore. No buyer has ever used this on my names. Besides I'm in EU and the new OSS law triggers complications on installments (long story and out of context).

But you can use installment if you want since it's out of my experience I can't comment on that one in particular.
 
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My daughter just said to me (she works with me on domains):

Giving them min offer actually teaches the buyers that they can get out with cheap.

She's right. Too many sellers are teaching buyers to fish a lot for various names and looking for dirt cheap.

This doesn't help us. We have to learn stick to our pricing.
 
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If we are talking about MakeOffer model (without BIN)...
Minimum offer must be hidden like on Epik. Then it is effective to drop most timewasters...
When it is visible like @Sedo - they bid exactly what they see on their pages, and in most cases further negotiations don't produce any good sales.
 
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Hard to say exactly how much it increased but at least 40% or possibly 50% extra.

Increase was like double on my domains priced lower than $300. See my series of BIN sales reported.

I don't offer installment anymore. No buyer has ever used this on my names. Besides I'm in EU and the new OSS law triggers complications on installments (long story and out of context).

But you can use installment if you want since it's out of my experience I can't comment on that one in particular.


Forgive if I missed this point. But how does this data have anything to do with your predominantly Afternic listing sales.They are only bin. Or make offer. Not bin with make offer option. I thought their NS.3 NS.4 don't show both but you can set a floor for broker interaction also if desired. But maybe I'm missing something. Or are you speaking specifically of Dan sales ?
 
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Forgive if I missed this point. But how does this data have anything to do with your predominantly Afternic listing sales.They are only bin. Or make offer. Not bin with make offer option. I thought their NS.3 NS.4 don't show both but you can set a floor for broker interaction also if desired. But maybe I'm missing something. Or are you speaking specifically of Dan sales ?

This is not just about Afternic . Same happens with Dan for example.

Side note I don't use either NS at Afternic. I'm using a lander redirect to their BIN/Make offer page.

Example here: https://www.afternic.com/domain/slicknation.com

Edit: All their NS options always worked less well for me. NS5/NS6 never worked and yet I can't tell the reason. But a times many domains don't even work at all with NS5/NS6.
 
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@twiki
What is your opinion about afternic fast transfer & which lander you think brong more sale?

I never use afternic lander, only dan or epik lander.
Do you think it is a bad thing?
 
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What I noticed about make offer + BIN is that it works better for domains you are willing to sell below $1k which means that buyers use make offer to try to get your domain in the $500 to $1000 range even if the domain is priced at $3000+.
 
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What I noticed about make offer + BIN is that it works better for domains you are willing to sell below $1k which means that buyers use make offer to try to get your domain in the $500 to $1000 range even if the domain is priced at $3000+.

That's incorrect pricing in my opinion. Or you're not confident about your prices. And you lose money. I'd be careful here.

Few buyers are willing to go make offer. It's stressful for many. You should price it where you see it going in this case. So you rather keep sales out, by not having a BIN. you go for the 15% of buyers(or so) that would enter a make offer, and sell it... for less. Edit: and you give them time to think, get buyer remorse and... not pay.

Doesn't make sense to me whatsoever.

With BIN, you'll get the same sales, but much faster sale-through = higher revenue.

I don't really discount names that much, unless either a) I decide that domain is weak and I overpriced it initially, or b) renewal is coming and I want to flip this domain quick so I can get far better names for the amount.

Correction, this year I don't discount them at all except in above 2 cases. Neither did I so much in the past.

I'm posting a lot of various sales in the sales thread. Have you ever seen me posting a negotiation from make offer ...?

It never brought me good money. And I'm very good at negotiations, I've been doing this for a couple decades in other business so I feel like fish in the water negotiating. It just doesn't pay, unless domain is high 4-fig and above where impulse buying isn't there.

Edit: Another thing is MATH.

Think about this. With a sale-through of roughly 1%+ on average, with $10 spent on a domain, you have to sell it over 1k+ to make money.

So you have two options really:

1) put a price above 1k+ and stick to it. Renew if this is a good name. = profit

2) put a price like $299 or so (anyway in the low range) and keep it there for the whole year. Make the right price in the beginning. = 5...8% STR in my case => even more money. If you do the math.

And no stress of thinking whether to renew or not the rubbish.

Edit 2: With a reduction in the $500 and up range, you won't get that much STR increase as per my tests. So a price like $199, $250 or $299 would be more suitable. It's counter-intuitive as you sell for less but the very high STR changes things, and it's like that because you enter the market price range.
 
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Adding another advantage:

Much less work. Cause you don't need to set a min offer at all.
 
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By what margin has your STR increased after removing make offer? Also, what do you think about BIN only with payment installments available?

A CEO of a brandable marketplace (I forget which one) recently said that buy now + make offer performs worse than either just buy now or make offer because it creates pricing confusion in the buyer and also eliminates impulse buy.
So he pretty much agrees with you.

Screenshot_2021-09-01-15-56-48-386_com.android.chrome.png
 
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This has been true in my sales also. BIN has been the choice of all my sales. Ive yet to have a sale with the make offer option. hmmm. :)
 
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This has been true in my sales also. BIN has been the choice of all my sales. Ive yet to have a sale with the make offer option. hmmm. :)

When I used make offer, I got lowballs and if I upped the price, unpaids. Mostly. Did have some make offer sales but sooo few.

Waste of time.
 
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@twiki
What is your opinion about afternic fast transfer & which lander you think brong more sale?

I never use afternic lander, only dan or epik lander.
Do you think it is a bad thing?

You can use any lander you want as long as it works for you. I don't think it is a bad thing.

I'm not using Dan anymore but not due to the platform not working for me. There are other more technical things at play, such as the Sav issues and others. Dan has converted good enough for me.

For now I'm using a redirect to the afternic BIN/make offer page, see my previous post above where there is a link of that type.
 
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That's incorrect pricing in my opinion. Or you're not confident about your prices. And you lose money. I'd be careful here.

Few buyers are willing to go make offer. It's stressful for many. You should price it where you see it going in this case. So you rather keep sales out, by not having a BIN. you go for the 15% of buyers(or so) that would enter a make offer, and sell it... for less. Edit: and you give them time to think, get buyer remorse and... not pay.

Doesn't make sense to me whatsoever.

With BIN, you'll get the same sales, but much faster sale-through = higher revenue.

I don't really discount names that much, unless either a) I decide that domain is weak and I overpriced it initially, or b) renewal is coming and I want to flip this domain quick so I can get far better names for the amount.

Correction, this year I don't discount them at all except in above 2 cases. Neither did I so much in the past.

I'm posting a lot of various sales in the sales thread. Have you ever seen me posting a negotiation from make offer ...?

It never brought me good money. And I'm very good at negotiations, I've been doing this for a couple decades in other business so I feel like fish in the water negotiating. It just doesn't pay, unless domain is high 4-fig and above where impulse buying isn't there.

Edit: Another thing is MATH.

Think about this. With a sale-through of roughly 1%+ on average, with $10 spent on a domain, you have to sell it over 1k+ to make money.

So you have two options really:

1) put a price above 1k+ and stick to it. Renew if this is a good name. = profit

2) put a price like $299 or so (anyway in the low range) and keep it there for the whole year. Make the right price in the beginning. = 5...8% STR in my case => even more money. If you do the math.

And no stress of thinking whether to renew or not the rubbish.

Edit 2: With a reduction in the $500 and up range, you won't get that much STR increase as per my tests. So a price like $199, $250 or $299 would be more suitable. It's counter-intuitive as you sell for less but the very high STR changes things, and it's like that because you enter the market price range.

You made too many assumptions from my post, I said that "buyers use make offer to try to get your domain in the $500 to $1000 range", I didn't say that I accept that all the time (I do sometimes thought).

Here is my own experience with landers:

  1. BIN landers yields the highest revenue per domain, but they lead to lower number of sales. In theory BIN landers should yield higher total revenue, but I never tested BIN only for long time to confirm.
  2. I switched to BIN+ Make offer for sometime, this performed the worst for me, but lead to more frequent sales.
  3. Then I switched to make offer only, I received a lot of low ball offers, but I got better results and more sales than #2 (BIN+Offer)
  4. Few days ago I switched back to BIN + Make offer, but this time I made min offer 50% of the BIN.
After reading this thread I am quite convinced to go back to BIN only, however I am hesitant to switch off "make offer" completely because it has some advantages:
  1. It is the only way for the buyer to contact you before buying (if you have privacy on).
  2. In some cases you may receive fair offers on domains that you overpriced
  3. Sometimes you may receive offers on domains that you priced fairly but you are confident that will never receive other offers in the futures. These are usually domains with very limited pool of end users.
  4. In some cases you need extra cash to cover renewals. August was very poor month for me and I paid a lot on renewals (to avoid paying more after 7% increase), so in August I accepted an offer that is 30% of BIN just to recover.
 
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1- It is the only way for the buyer to contact you before buying (if you have privacy on).

Not necessarily.

You can use a custom lander where you have a buy button that takes the user at Dan or whatever.

And on the same page have your email address as well or a contact form.

I used this successfully.
 
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I forgot to mention the remaining landing page option which is BIN + Installments.

For me this is my least favorite option, I tried it in the past and I had 2 domains sold on installments but both were abandoned after 1st installment payment!! Which made me to completely switch off installments on all my domains.
 
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Interestingly, most domains on the marketplace here asking solely for offers via PM with no indication whatsoever for any price range or any available BIN price. The worst tactic to attract buyers in my experience.

Would never contact a seller if I already know he/she tries to hide any price range, these are normally the sellers with astronomic pricing concepts.

I get more traffic for BIN priced domains than for offer only. And the first contacts from most offer only domains read like "can do $50". Had never this issue with BIN prices.
 
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Interestingly, most domains on the marketplace here asking solely for offers via PM with no indication whatsoever for any price range or any available BIN price. The worst tactic to attract buyers in my experience.

Would never contact a seller if I already know he/she tries to hide any price range, these are normally the sellers with astronomic pricing concepts.

I get more traffic for BIN priced domains than for offer only. And the first contacts from most offer only domains read like "can do $50". Had never this issue with BIN prices.
The marketplace here is mostly domainers, not end users. I agree that I prefer to see fixed price and that is the section I visit most.
 
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Few buyers are willing to go make offer. It's stressful for many. You should price it where you see it going in this case. So you rather keep sales out, by not having a BIN. you go for the 15% of buyers(or so) that would enter a make offer, and sell it... for less. Edit: and you give them time to think, get buyer remorse and... not pay.
Making an offer is legally binding, no legal room for not paying.
I didn't imagine that the danger of the buyer breaching the contract would be so real.

Should be introduced some sort of KYC procedure when buyer sign up in a marketplace?
 
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So, some downvoted my previous post, I can live with that but I'd like to know why, just in order to know what was wrong with what I said.


Probably - I can't but speculate - it's about the KYC idea.
I thought, as a seller my identity is somehow known to the registrar, they checked my phone number.
Why shouldn't it be the same for the buyer?
 
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So, some downvoted my previous post, I can live with that but I'd like to know why, just in order to know what was wrong with what I said.


Probably - I can't but speculate - it's about the KYC idea.
I thought, as a seller my identity is somehow known to the registrar, they checked my phone number.
Why shouldn't it be the same for the buyer?
I just made a try using make offer, I think I waste my time. even with agreements reached, I often had no payments.
 
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MO seems pointless unless you have super premium domains.
 
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