Afternic - Official Thread

[GoDaddy]

Hello NamePros!
By popular demand, we have launched a dedicated feedback thread for Afternic, the GoDaddy-owned domain name marketplace.

We have created this thread as a way for you to tell us what works, what doesn't work, and what features you'd like to see at Afternic (please be constructive with your feedback). We're looking forward to hearing from the domain investment community to help us shape the future of Afternic.

We will also be sharing Afternic product updates in this thread.

Please note that this thread is not meant for support. Please email our support team at [email protected] for assistance.

 

[bmugford]

Heads up @GoDaddy /Afternic!

I pulled my entire portfolio shortly after the "Boost" announcement.

Yesterday I decided to re-add them and this is one of the many issues I discovered.

There is a massive sync failure on the Afternic side.

Newly added domains are not generating internal Afternic marketplace sales pages.

Visiting the internal sales page (afternic.com/domain/domainhere.com) results in the following error:

Show attachment 265270

The BIN and Custom landers appear to be fine. However, when you click next, you'll see that buyers are not being directed shopping carts.

Instead, they are being directed to inquiry forms as shown in the example below:

Show attachment 265271

Show attachment 265272


If that's not bad enough, when there's total sync failure on the Afternic side, the only partner network who receives a feed is Godaddy.

For all you investors using the BIN and Custom landers, you might want to rethink it until they get this sync under control.

Again, this only affects new Afternic listings. If you delete and re-add, those will be affected as well.

Anyone using BIN and Custom landers should easily be able to duplicate this with their new listings.

Note: The example I used here is not from my portfolio, which is why it's redacted.

I was planning on moving my Dan.com priced domains to Afternic priced landers, and moving my make offer domains (the majority) to other landers. I am just not sure which ones yet.

Now, I am second guessing even pointing my priced domains to Afternic landers with the slow cart, and now these new issues.

@GoDaddy really just needs to keep Dan open. This is not going to work.

Every experience with Afternic is worse than Dan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Brad

 

[411domains]

I was planning on moving my Dan.com priced domains to Afternic priced landers, and moving my make offer domains (the majority) to other landers. I am just not sure which ones yet.

Now, I am second guessing even pointing my priced domains to Afternic landers with the slow cart, and now these new issues.

@GoDaddy really just needs to keep Dan open. This is not going to work.

Every experience with Afternic is worse than Dan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Brad

@bmugford, They need to do a whole lot more than just keep DAN open. I'm just sayin'.

When they get this issue resolved and for the sake of a clean sync, I'll re-list, but I certainly won't be pointing my portfolio to their nameservers. I'll stick with platforms who actually know what their doing.

This way they can continue on this path of destruction and self sabotage with sync failures, cart degradation, mystery reviews, blocking entire countries, etc., etc. and I won't need to concern myself with these issues, because I won't have all my eggs in one basket.

If buyers can't checkout at the registrar, they'll try the landers and vice versa.

They already knew this. That's why they implemented the 25% penalty for "not keeping it in the family."
They want all your eggs in their degraded basket.

If you're using their nameservers, there's a very good chance you're going to lose sales or get stuck in negotiation mode with brokers who may or may not be able to close and potentially stall leads that would have otherwise been BIN sales.

My STR has always been higher when not using their nameservers.

Here was an interesting, but quite serious issue from 10 days ago:

 

[Acroplex]

Decided to give Afternic a test run for a month. Past migration from Dan, some domains failed to sync. Instead of drilling in on the issue and resolving it, Afternic support asked me to delete the domains and re-add them with verification records. LOL.

There is also another controversy that I will share if it doesn't get resolved to my satisfaction.

Update: Afternic's compliance review agreed with my position and resolved the issue. It's worth noting that they did so knowing that they had no option but to resolve it - that's what I can share for now.

 

[Acroplex]

The obvious question: Post-migration, why can't we delete any domains at Dan.com, or the entire account?

 

[td11]

I believe GoDaddy should keep Dan.com open as well. I’ve already removed all my domain names from Dan.com and changed the nameservers to Sedo. I’ve added the domains to Afternic just in case someone finds them through GoDaddy search results. GoDaddy keeps saying that features like negotiating your own leads and the Dan bot will be added to Afternic later, but for people like me, whose only job is selling domains, this isn’t practical. I can’t just switch nameservers to a platform that isn’t reliable yet and start testing it; that would cause me to lose income.

I know a few other sellers who sold a significant number of European TLDs through Dan.com, and they’ve now switched their nameservers to Sedo and Fruits.co. These sellers were closing sales on Dan.com almost daily. I found Dan.com to be a great platform, and I would gladly continue using it if it stayed open. But Afternic isn’t going to work for me. It’s a shame Dan.com had to end this way.

 

[SpareDomains]

Fixing the "in review" problem should be one of your top priorities right now @Afternic.

If it's algorithmic, something is broken in the algorithm. and hopefully easily fixed.

If it is AI you are using, it is completely untrustworthy as implemented.

Agreed, nobody cares about new features being added if the basic functions don't work or 10-50% of your portfolio randomly goes into review for no reason. NamePros, Efty, Sedo, Atom White Label, DomainEasy etc... all work without "In Review" headaches and the reason I point 0 domains to Afternic.

 

[Synozeer]

I just randomly tested one of my landing pages. I tried to purchase that name and after clicking buy got a blank page with the message, "Error occurred processing link". I then tried another of my domains and that name got added to my cart (after a too long delay) and I noticed the first domain was in my cart too, so it did get added even though it got an error. Tried a few more times and they all worked.

If I had to guess, that error probably intermittently pops up, and obviously the long cart delays still haven't been fixed.

 

[br1ll1on]

reputation flushed down the toilet:

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/afternic.com?sort=recency

Holy Molly, 4.something to 2.8 yeah I'm glad I point my NS somewhere else

 

[Name2go]

A positive note:
Changed NS for a few names away from AN two days ago. Within hours one of these domains was sold - on AN.
LTO 24 months, registrar GD, even FT was successful.

A domain watch service could be the reason for this deal, triggering kinda FOMO.
Could … just thinking outside the box.

 

[phaethon]

I'm in Greece now and tried to buy one of my names I sell for $1950. The final price in GD cart is $2354 including taxes. That was not shown before If I remember well. Is this the same if the buyer is in the US or is this an EU tax thing?

 

[skshogun]

I'm in Greece now and tried to buy one of my names I sell for $1950. The final price in GD card is $2354 including taxes. That was not shown before If I remember well. Is this the same if the buyer is in the US or is this an EU tax thing?

EU countries VAT. Also don't be surprised if you'll travel to another EU country and the price will be slightly lower/higher as each country VAT rate can be different.

 

[NameGroove]

A positive note:
Changed NS for a few names away from AN two days ago. Within hours one of these domains was sold - on AN.
LTO 24 months, registrar GD, even FT was successful.

A domain watch service could be the reason for this deal, triggering kinda FOMO.
Could … just thinking outside the box.

I find a jump in sales after renewing. It's possible buyers monitor NS to see if they can catch drops... and when they see renewals or NS changes - they purchase

 

[twiki]

I find a jump in sales after renewing. It's possible buyers monitor NS to see if they can catch drops... and when they see renewals or NS changes - they purchase

That jump is well known.

Edit: They hope to catch it after it drops. Once renewed, depression sets in, later they finally give up and hit the buy button, thank you very much.

 

[GoDaddy]

Terrible first experience.

Got 3 domain buyers. All different domains. One bought it, still on hold for 4 days. Another buyer is willing to buy, domain not showing up in the GoDaddy search bar and when he clicks the buy it now button on the Afternic buy it now landing page it forwards to a 'request a price' landing page.... Tried the 'create a checkout link' option as an alternative ,'something went wrong', another bug...

Another buyer bought a domain, I tried to push it no response from the transfer agent if it's possible.Tried live chat, they said they would update me, nothing, no progress at all.

Really need another marketplace this is costing me money.

Hi @nick3
We're sorry to hear that. Could you DM us with a little more information on these cases? While support will provide you with an update, we'd like to share this experience with the team.

Because of Afternic's inability to have more than one payee, I have been spending several days preparing to move some domains to a secondary account.

I provided the list of domains that needed to be moved on Thursday morning. It's now Saturday and the domains have not moved.

This is especially frustrating because there is supposedly a $15K lease deal waiting on one of the domains.

Everything about Afternic is more inefficient than Dan.

My Afternic account manager is great, but I get the feeling that there is an unsustainable workload being put on these employees especially with Dan.com closing. Did GoDaddy hire an army of new employees to handle the extra leads? I doubt it.

The entire process is so much slower with Afternic than Dan from the communications to transfer.

The whole thing is frustrating. @GoDaddy

Brad

Hi Brad,
Thanks for this. You should have the ability to change your payout profile in your sales dashboard for a brief window before a payout is scheduled. However, let me check if there's anything we can do in the system to help you out here.

Please let me know how your account move goes, and DM if you require any assistance.

I agree with this as well. There is really no reason Afternic/GoDaddy should not have some 24/7 staff.

We do. We've now increased the coverage of Afternic's support staff to 7 days per week.

I'm up to a cool 80% of my portfolio "in review" lol what a joke. What makes it even worse is that you get no notification. Surely there should be an email saying such and such a name have entered review status so you can do something about it. They rely on you logging in to see. How many people are unaware their names are not listed?

Another thing is that every time I log in and go to my "portfolio" page the whole page is greyed out with a small info light box trying to tell me something about BINs I think but the "close" button for this box is below the screen and the screen doesn't scroll. If my laptop wasn't touchscreen with a rotating screen I'd never be able to close the light box and never be able to do anything to my portfolio!

It's laughable how bad Afternic has become.

@GoDaddy any plans on making Afternic usable any time soon?

Hi @D Haynes
80% of names in review! Can you DM us your username?

Fixing the "in review" problem should be one of your top priorities right now @Afternic.

If it's algorithmic, something is broken in the algorithm. and hopefully easily fixed.

If it is AI you are using, it is completely untrustworthy as implemented.

Hi Bob,
Thanks for sharing your examples via email. We've shared this with the Afternic product manager to see whether there's anything out of the ordinary occurring here.

Heads up @GoDaddy /Afternic!

I pulled my entire portfolio shortly after the "Boost" announcement.

Yesterday I decided to re-add them and this is one of the many issues I discovered.

There is a massive sync failure on the Afternic side.

Newly added domains are not generating internal Afternic marketplace sales pages.

Visiting the internal sales page (afternic.com/domain/domainhere.com) results in the following error:

Show attachment 265270

The BIN and Custom landers appear to be fine. However, when you click next, you'll see that buyers are not being directed shopping carts.

Instead, they are being directed to inquiry forms as shown in the example below:

Show attachment 265271

Show attachment 265272


If that's not bad enough, when there's total sync failure on the Afternic side, the only partner network who receives a feed is Godaddy.

For all you investors using the BIN and Custom landers, you might want to rethink it until they get this sync under control.

Again, this only affects new Afternic listings. If you delete and re-add, those will be affected as well.

Anyone using BIN and Custom landers should easily be able to duplicate this with their new listings.

Note: The example I used here is not from my portfolio, which is why it's redacted.

Thanks @411domains. This does look like a sync issue that you're experiencing. System resources are temporarily loaded while we are concluding the migration of Dan.com domain names to Afternic. Could you DM us your Afternic username? We'd like to share this with our team.

Update: Afternic's compliance review agreed with my position and resolved the issue. It's worth noting that they did so knowing that they had no option but to resolve it - that's what I can share for now.

Thanks, Theo. Glad this was resolved successfully for you.

I just randomly tested one of my landing pages. I tried to purchase that name and after clicking buy got a blank page with the message, "Error occurred processing link". I then tried another of my domains and that name got added to my cart (after a too long delay) and I noticed the first domain was in my cart too, so it did get added even though it got an error. Tried a few more times and they all worked.

If I had to guess, that error probably intermittently pops up, and obviously the long cart delays still haven't been fixed.

Do you mind DMing the domain in question?

I'm in Greece now and tried to buy one of my names I sell for $1950. The final price in GD card is $2354 including taxes. That was not shown before If I remember well. Is this the same if the buyer is in the US or is this an EU tax thing?

Hi @phaethon,
In some countries, GoDaddy is required to add local taxes, usually VAT or GST. GoDaddy does this by including the tax in the purchase price during checkout.

 

[phaethon]

Hi @phaethon,
In some countries, GoDaddy is required to add local taxes, usually VAT or GST. GoDaddy does this by including the tax in the purchase price during checkout.

@GoDaddy maybe you should mention it as a price breakdown, because the sale price simply changes when you add the name to the cart. It's like you are ready to pay the bill and it's $400 or $1000 more expensive in a moment!

 

[D Haynes]

Hi @phaethon,
In some countries, GoDaddy is required to add local taxes, usually VAT or GST. GoDaddy does this by including the tax in the purchase price during checkout.

Shouldn't that only be VAT or GST on the GD commission though and not the entire sale amount? The VAT on the sale isn't GD's to pay, that's down to the individual seller.

 

[411domains]

Thanks @411domains. This does look like a sync issue that you're experiencing. System resources are temporarily loaded while we are concluding the migration of Dan.com domain names to Afternic. Could you DM us your Afternic username? We'd like to share this with our team.

@GoDaddy, It's not just me. This issue affects all recent Afternic listings from the past week or two.

I no longer have anything listed with Afternic, but I have no doubt once NamePros members here start checking their recently added names and landers, they'll begin chiming in and we'll be able narrow down an exact date when the sync began to fail.

In the meantime, it's being investigated.

 

[skshogun]

Shouldn't that only be VAT or GST on the GD commission though and not the entire sale amount? The VAT on the sale isn't GD's to pay, that's down to the individual seller.

All of it is GD's to pay since you sell to GoDaddy and they sell it to the "end-buyer".
Since you don't even know the buyer's country let alone any info to put on the invoice you wouldn't be able to properly calculate the VAT rate.

 

[Yanosh]

I have Request Price lander for all my domains.
Just noticed that all newly added domains to my portfolio got Custom Lander instead.

 

[bmugford]

Hi Brad,
Thanks for this. You should have the ability to change your payout profile in your sales dashboard for a brief window before a payout is scheduled. However, let me check if there's anything we can do in the system to help you out here.

The selecting a payee right before payout can work, but is also inconvenient and sometimes I have multiple payouts from domain sales needing to go to different payees because they are owed by different entities.

In the past I could just set a payee on a per-domain basis, with GoDaddy auctions and premium listings. It was much easier for accounting.

When I talked to Afternic, really the only solution is multiple accounts.

Please let me know how your account move goes, and DM if you require any assistance.

This is step 1 of the 3 part plan I had to move domains around.

After the listings at Afternic are updated, I will need to decide what landers I am going to use for "make offer" domains for now (Saw, Atom, Efty, DomainEasy, NamePros, etc.).

The lack of self-brokerage is a deal breaker for me. Things at Afternic seem to move along at a snail's pace. That is not a good thing when it comes to interested buyers.

Brad