Dynadot

Alter.com Marketplace

Spaceship Spaceship
Watch

Deven Patel

Founder, Alter.comEstablished Member
Impact
1,075
Hi all,

I wanted to introduce a new premium domain marketplace we just launched called Alter. I would love to hear your thoughts! As the world’s largest community of domainers, your feedback would be invaluable.

Let me introduce myself. Although I’m new to NamePros, I’ve been around the block. I’ve been buying and selling domains for my own startup ideas for over 20 years. As a serial entrepreneur, I founded a number of startups across various industries like marketing, web hosting, social networking, blogging, and SaaS. This experience has helped me understand how indispensable a brand name is to a business.

Most new entrepreneurs don’t think twice about their company name. Our goal is to change that! A brand name literally has the power to make or break their business. This is more true today than ever before now that there are countless alternatives to every product or service imaginable. Sure, every business may have their own world-changing differentiator but from the outside they all look the same at which point the main differentiator ends up becoming their brand name. In a world full of distractions, we no longer have the attention span to thoroughly research what we buy so we rely on our emotions. This is why large businesses like Apple and Amazon spend billions on their “brand” alone because they understand that customer perception is everything.

Anyway, I noticed that most marketplaces that exist today are focused more on the seller rather than the buyer. Our goal is to reverse the equation and prioritize buyers because I think they are the key to success in any industry. The domain industry is no exception. Without buyers, there’s no money. This is why we’ve made it our mission to help entrepreneurs succeed!

And what’s with the 30-35% commission rate most of these marketplaces are charging? Unless they’re doing more work than a human broker, I don’t think anything over the industry average of 15-20% is warranted. We’re changing that. Alter has one of the lowest rates in the industry, an all-inclusive 10% commission fee when a name sells. There are no other fees or restrictions.

What do you think? Are we on the right track or barking up the wrong tree?

Deven
This was a promoted post.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
40
•••
The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
It is just MUSTHAVE requirements to be competitive.
We (domainers) don't ask anything special.
 
Last edited:
2
•••
We could write a lot more posts about this, but maybe it's good to just wait for Deven's answer. He is well aware of what is possible, it is now a matter of implementation.
He can always answer individually and in time, it is not necessary to wait and then post replies to all in A4 format...
 
Last edited:
2
•••
(enormous amount of times favorited in a short period)

I can only see the amount in the Dashboard, not whether they are humans or bots.

You are able to view more in my account. The abnormal amount of Favorites was e.g. on October 16, and October 18, 2021.

The anomaly can be seen here (purple line).

upload_2021-10-18_23-0-52.png
 
1
•••
I'll be checking out selling on there. Saving capital for another venture I am planning.
 
1
•••
Very good experience.Good Support and ultra fast payment!!
 
3
•••
Dns records instead of NS, bulk check
Min offer at 100
API
 
Last edited:
1
•••
@Deven Patel What's the actual number on Wire payments? What is the minimum dollar amount required for Sellers to be paid by wire?
 
1
•••
By saying it's automated (in your other posting), you're implying that Alter is making up these numbers itself. That will not be the case. What is probably going on is that Google, Bing or some other bots (web spiders) that index the Alter website also create Favorites during their visits to our landers. Alter is usually doing a good job filtering these bots from the stats, since these are not human visitors, but it is very difficult to filter all bots this way. That's why Deven asked for more details, so that he will be able to filter out non-human visitors from the statistics.

Thanks a lot. I understand clearly, and I so appreciate the marketplace. I'm just curious about my 'favorites' pattern.
 
1
•••
Does Alter offer a White Label Marketplace like they do on Squadhelp?
 
1
•••
@Deven Patel will Alter offer cryptocurrency as a means of payment/cashout anytime soon?
 
1
•••
Do Alter still require to remove our names from Sedo / Dan if listed with Alter?
 
0
•••
Last edited:
4
•••
Last edited:
1
•••
2
•••
@phaethon

The nameservers for your domains have to be ns1.alter.com and ns2.alter.com all the time, though.
 
2
•••
2
•••
Oh? Or else... what happens?

Alter checks regularly. You will get an email like this:

It looks like your domain name example.com is not correctly pointing to our nameservers so we have temporarily deactivated your listing on the Alter marketplace.

If you still own this domain and would like to list it for sale, please re-verify it using the instructions found in your account.
 
2
•••
Be mindful the partner sites (Sedo for example) will mark your name up 20-30% of your Alter price, most of the partner sites do this as well when you list on Afternic the other partner sites mark name up 30-30%. So it makes it tough at times because you have to factor that in to your pricing, if you price a name at let's say 1k, it is most often marked up to 1.2-1.3k on the partner sites.....
 
1
•••
First sale on Alter and I'm grateful for the 10% commission, which is 1/3 the rate of Alter's competitors.

BB/SH: 30% commission under $5k
Alter: 10% commission under $5k

To put this in perspective, compare an average $2,500 sale over 100 sales on Alter vs. competitors:

BB/SH: 100 sales @ $2,500. You pay $75,000 in commission

Alter: 100 sales @ $2,500. You pay $25,000 in commission​

Over 100 sales @ $2,500, you pocket an additional $50,000 by listing at Alter vs. the leading brandable marketplaces.

Alter doesn't yet have the traffic or sales levels as the leading marketplaces, true, but it has been growing fast.

The low commission from this first Alter sale makes me reconsider whether the BB/SH premium is worthwhile.

To compensate for their 3x commission, do BB & SH deliver at least 30% more sales?

This is roughly the high standard they have to maintain to equal Alter (or DAN or the SH WLM, if you prefer).

I won't rush to move all names off the major marketplaces yet but with any marketplace, it's always helpful to consider the bottom line and how it compares to alternatives.
 
Last edited:
11
•••
which is 1/3 the rate of Alter's competitors
I don't think other brandable marketplaces are Alter's competitors in the way you imply, since Alter switched towards being a general purpose free-to-list-anything marketplace.
 
Last edited:
1
•••
I don't think other brandable marketplaces are Alter's competitors in the way you imply, since Alter switched towards being a general purpose free-to-list-anything marketplace.

That isn’t the point is it. He is talking about the incredibly high commissions domainers routinely hand over on small sales. Also SH WLM takes any names so your point is well pointless.
 
1
•••
That isn’t the point is it. He is talking about the incredibly high commissions domainers routinely hand over on small sales. Also SH WLM takes any names so your point is well pointless.
But SH WLM is 7.5%, DomainBanana was not making comparison to it, just the brandable 30% SH.
 
1
•••
Alter checks regularly. You will get an email like this:

It looks like your domain name example.com is not correctly pointing to our nameservers so we have temporarily deactivated your listing on the Alter marketplace.

If you still own this domain and would like to list it for sale, please re-verify it using the instructions found in your account.
Alter checks regularly. You will get an email like this:

It looks like your domain name example.com is not correctly pointing to our nameservers so we have temporarily deactivated your listing on the Alter marketplace.

If you still own this domain and would like to list it for sale, please re-verify it using the instructions found in your account.
Is this true? We have to keep the DNS pointing to Alter even after verifying our domains?
 
1
•••
Is this true? We have to keep the DNS pointing to Alter even after verifying our domains?

Can confirm once again.

As soon as you change DNS to something non-Alter, the domain gets temp delisted.
 
1
•••
As soon as you change DNS to something non-Alter, the domain gets temp delisted.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.

Wish I had known about that earlier! 😄
 
1
•••
Back