information Afternic Update

[Joe Styler]

There are several threads ongoing about Afternic so it was easier to start a new one here with the big picture of what is going on. A few weeks ago we had a major release which did away with the escrow process on Afternic and started a new service called Transaction Assurance. There are several main reasons why we did it, two of the big ones being:
1. Compliance - We are not an escrow company and using this new flow allows us to be compliant to all laws in the areas we operate which is very important for everyone.
2. Ease of use - Much of what we have done over the past 2 years around the Aftermarket is being done to reduce overall friction for the buyer and seller to allow domains to move to buyers easier and make managing your domains for sale easier.

There are other reasons for doing this which tie into a bigger picture of other projects we have in line for the coming year or so which also allow for better sales for our sellers such as faster payment times and more International payment options as well as better/easier domain management and some bigger improvements that have been asked for by customers for a while.

The project was not rushed or left untested. In fact we put in over 8 man years of labor on it and did extensive testing. Part of the project involved us integrating with two 3rd party providers to help with International payments and communications. These are big name companies with a track record of success and utilizing their tools behind the scenes will help everyone in the long run to be able to sell more domains easier.

Obviously things have not gone as well as we would have liked, but we are actively working on resolving the issues around communication and payments. We have had meetings at the highest levels to take care of this as a very high priority. As of today we believe most email communication issue are resolved.

We are not only meeting about things we are actively deploying new code and changes and other teams are working to manually jump in and help out so we can get answers for our customers and make sure they are being paid. I personally saw many people working late nights and over the weekends doing what they could to keep improving the processes because our customers are very important to us. We have a good team who have all pulled together to try and help it is not just me on the forum answering questions I couldn't do it without the help of our Aftermarket teams.

I think we are very close to having a smoothly operating process again with a better ultimate process for the future which will allow you to grow with us and continue to sell domains at a better rate of return. Thank you for your patience and for being a customer.

If you are waiting for payment the #1 thing I have seen resolve this the fastest is to login to your Afternic account and go to your payment settings. Make sure that you have a payment set up as a default option and that is correct. We migrated all the old payment information into the new system. If you are in doubt or cannot find a way to select a default payment option it is faster to create a new payment method (even using the same info you already have) and select that new payment method as your default. Doing this will tell the system to try and pay you for any outstanding balance you are owed.

 

[Bearded Goat]

@SpareDomains I agree totally. Great post.

Regarding this account validation problem. I receive it multiple times a day. It started happening a year or so ago when afternic asked everyone to change their passwords. Now I get the error daily. I have to clear my cookies and try again. Takes a lot of time

 

[CloudTech]

http://domainnamewire.com/2017/05/31/afternic-extends-reach-china-canada/#comments

The major problems with Afternic have summarized here by Casey.

Please do check here.

@Joe Styler

 

[CloudTech]

A good point raised here. Your make offer is useless if you are forcing us to put a BIN. I received a price request 3 days and I was force to place a bin. Up till now I don't know the position of the deal. Am just left in the dark. Every sales lead start with an offer. Telling us someone is interested but cannot buy due to the missing BIN is FRAUDULENT
Am very disappointed afternic is involved in this mess. How do you justify the huge commission you are collecting on deals? That is fraud mehn
It's possible you have received higher a BIN than you are disclosing on names. I can't trust you because you are not transparent enough to be trusted.

Great point here.
Maybe Afternic guys feel that greedy 20% cut could not justify the rubbish website full of bugs( which they stubbornly refuse to fix) and late or no replying support, so they will snap every chance to cut more.

 

[Joe Styler]

Spectacular answer and makes complete sense... Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed answer.

I have one question on the above, if a domain is listed as make offer, aren't your partners obligated to at least take an offer? Or just the lead? I understand your point about minimum offers and human nature to consider that as a near final price. I'm just asking to have full clarity for the scenario

The short answer is no they are not. We have over 100 different partner companies we work with built over many years with different contracts, different countries with different laws, and different needs etc. We do everything we can on our side to make your domain get as much sales exposure as we can working through all those variables for you so you only have to list in one place.

 

[Joe Styler]

http://domainnamewire.com/2017/05/31/afternic-extends-reach-china-canada/#comments

The major problems with Afternic have summarized here by Casey.

Please do check here.

@Joe Styler

We did read it over and are working to fix some of those things already.

 

[bluebox]

I just received payment scheduled on the 7th.
I'm shocked LOL
Hopefully it's not a fluke and things are improving.

 

[tonyk2000]

For each and every "Fast Transfer" @ BIN domain that I have with afternic, I promptly configured all 4 price fields (bin, makeoffer, floor... whatever) to have the same fixed BIN price.

With this configuration in place, auctions.godaddy.com, a GoDaddy website, presents my domains in the following way:

Enter Bid/Offer --> "Offer <65% of my price shown> or more" OR "Buy now for <my price shown>".

Accodingly, I did not configure any offers - neither with 65% limit, nor any other offers. BIN is BIN, thats all. Moreover, such a listing at auctions.godaddy.com is misleading to a potential customer, as they may think that the domain price may be somehow negotiable, which is in fact not the case.

Why this happens?

My portfolio is not unique with this problem, it appears that each and every afternic bin listing is affected when searched on auctions.godaddy.com

 

[4pm]

For each and every "Fast Transfer" @ BIN domain that I have with afternic, I promptly configured all 4 price fields (bin, makeoffer, floor... whatever) to have the same fixed BIN price.

With this configuration in place, auctions.godaddy.com, a GoDaddy website, presents my domains in the following way:

Enter Bid/Offer --> "Offer <65% of my price shown> or more" OR "Buy now for <my price shown>".

Accodingly, I did not configure any offers - neither with 65% limit, nor any other offers. BIN is BIN, thats all. Moreover, such a listing at auctions.godaddy.com is misleading to a potential customer, as they may think that the domain price may be somehow negotiable, which is in fact not the case.

Why this happens?

My portfolio is not unique with this problem, it appears that each and every afternic bin listing is affected when searched on auctions.godaddy.com

true. same here.

 

[carob]

Maybe your email is getting lost somehow. I see their statistics weekly and they have 95% of the emails they get responded to within 2 days and over 90% within one day. There are always issues which need to be sent to other teams which can take longer to get resolved. If you are not getting an answer on an email that would mean they are not getting it.

Hi Joe you are doing a good job here and I am sure all these problems and backlogs are stressful for Afternic staff as well. I have no desire to make their jobs more difficult but as a general comment, when you get performance stats like that you might want to be sceptical or look a bit deeper.

In other words, when companies set impossible performance targets for staff, they learn how to meet them by gaming the system - they have no choice. I have met people who answer calls who are told by their line boss to just tell people to ring back and then hang up. That improves the average response time to calls and the volume of calls answered. No one handling enquiries wants the difficult ones - they take time and screw up your stats so you want to offload them or ignore them.

 

[Mikeyboy]

They sucked in 2003, they suck today.

 

[Joe Styler]

For each and every "Fast Transfer" @ BIN domain that I have with afternic, I promptly configured all 4 price fields (bin, makeoffer, floor... whatever) to have the same fixed BIN price.

With this configuration in place, auctions.godaddy.com, a GoDaddy website, presents my domains in the following way:

Enter Bid/Offer --> "Offer <65% of my price shown> or more" OR "Buy now for <my price shown>".

Accodingly, I did not configure any offers - neither with 65% limit, nor any other offers. BIN is BIN, thats all. Moreover, such a listing at auctions.godaddy.com is misleading to a potential customer, as they may think that the domain price may be somehow negotiable, which is in fact not the case.

Why this happens?

My portfolio is not unique with this problem, it appears that each and every afternic bin listing is affected when searched on auctions.godaddy.com

If you have a BIN price don't put in a make offer price unless you want offers to be made, just leave that field blank. If you need to do this in bulk then you can reach out to me and I can have someone assist you in editing the domains' pricing.

 

[tonyk2000]

If you have a BIN price don't put in a make offer price unless you want offers to be made, just leave that field blank. If you need to do this in bulk then you can reach out to me and I can have someone assist you in editing the domains' pricing.

I tried this. It does not work. What I mean:

IF I have ("Buy Now", "Floor", "Reserve", "Minimim Offer") fields all filled with the same fixed value, and try to remove "Minimum Offer" by editing it on "portfolio" - "all domains" screen, the system would not let me even save the result, as "this field is required" red popup appears each time I delete the content of "Minimum Offer" field.

Joe, please advise

And... even if the configuration I currently have is not actually supposed to produce the desired result (simply pure fixed bin everywhere), where 65% min. offer suggested by gd auctions comes from? Why 65% min.? I do not have anything in my current config that might allow any afternic partner to suggest that I am willing to consider offers of or above 65% of my asking price

 

[tomcarl]

Confirming I'm having the same issues others have mentioned.

Right now I have around 150+ domains pending review for weeks, some maybe even longer than that. I've tried deleting the domains and re-listing them thinking it could've been the tech issue, but same thing, they're still there weeks/months pending.

I requested domains to be removed that were listed by previous owner about 5 days ago, no response yet. (it usually takes about a week with previous requests)

And some of my afternic listings appear in GoDaddy's registration path with straight BIN/add to cart (how I want it), others show the "Get it" button where they can give an offer. I've tried setting the same BIN price in all 4 columns, floor, reserve, min, etc. to remove the offer option, tried setting same BIN price in only minimum offer. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's at random.

One last thing I've been wondering about:

Any domain that is marked 'hidden' because it could be considered adult, is not showing up in the GoDaddy registration path or premium suggestions, is that right? I'm seeing other 'adult' domains being promoted in both places.

Thanks.

 

[Joe Styler]

I tried this. It does not work. What I mean:

IF I have ("Buy Now", "Floor", "Reserve", "Minimim Offer") fields all filled with the same fixed value, and try to remove "Minimum Offer" by editing it on "portfolio" - "all domains" screen, the system would not let me even save the result, as "this field is required" red popup appears each time I delete the content of "Minimum Offer" field.

Joe, please advise

And... even if the configuration I currently have is not actually supposed to produce the desired result (simply pure fixed bin everywhere), where 65% min. offer suggested by gd auctions comes from? Why 65% min.? I do not have anything in my current config that might allow any afternic partner to suggest that I am willing to consider offers of or above 65% of my asking price

Confirming I'm having the same issues others have mentioned.

Right now I have around 150+ domains pending review for weeks, some maybe even longer than that. I've tried deleting the domains and re-listing them thinking it could've been the tech issue, but same thing, they're still there weeks/months pending.

I requested domains to be removed that were listed by previous owner about 5 days ago, no response yet. (it usually takes about a week with previous requests)

And some of my afternic listings appear in GoDaddy's registration path with straight BIN/add to cart (how I want it), others show the "Get it" button where they can give an offer. I've tried setting the same BIN price in all 4 columns, floor, reserve, min, etc. to remove the offer option, tried setting same BIN price in only minimum offer. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's at random.

One last thing I've been wondering about:

Any domain that is marked 'hidden' because it could be considered adult, is not showing up in the GoDaddy registration path or premium suggestions, is that right? I'm seeing other 'adult' domains being promoted in both places.

Thanks.

You can both PM me and I will let you speak with Cameron who can help you list your names on Afternic in bulk and answer your questions as well as fix any issues with names being listed already etc.

 

[tonyk2000]

And some of my afternic listings appear in GoDaddy's registration path with straight BIN/add to cart (how I want it)

I've seen the same but for domains that have both godaddy premium listing enabled and afternic distribution enabled (GD-regged domains). It appears that for such listings GD elects to use premium listing setup on both godaddy homepage and auctions.godaddy.com which is a good thing. GoDaddys premium listings are not currently affected by "make 65% offer" auctions bug.

Joe: PM sent

 

[tonyk2000]

I've tried setting the same BIN price in all 4 columns, floor, reserve, min, etc. to remove the offer option, tried setting same BIN price in only minimum offer. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's at random.

Based on my preious experience, it may well be that some of the results you see on godaddy.com and/or auctions.godaddy.com are in fact inspired by somebody elses listings of your domains _outside afternic_, such as direct submissions to gd auctions.

You may try to temporary remove/disable problematic domains inside afternic account, wait for a couple of days to have everything synchronised, and search for these domains 1-by-1 on auctions.godaddy.com. Each and every domain you will still find as available with makeoffer of whatever on auctions.godaddy.com should be submitted for manual removal by gd staff, but for removal from auctions.godaddy.com exclusively - not from afternic, where you are already one and only correct owner

 

[campout]

All Afternic names with a BIN show up in GD Auctions with the ability to make an offer at 65% of the BIN, regardless of whatever else you put in other columns at Afternic.

 

[Shimmy]

If it has been years probably not. They should only be pending review for less than a day in most cases. If they are not moving out of that status they are stuck and need to be escalated via [email protected].

Maybe your email is getting lost somehow. I see their statistics weekly and they have 95% of the emails they get responded to within 2 days and over 90% within one day. There are always issues which need to be sent to other teams which can take longer to get resolved. If you are not getting an answer on an email that would mean they are not getting it.

I emailed them Wednesday afternoon after you suggested it. I never got a response and then I see your other post about 95% get responses after 2 days. I guess I'm in the 5%. And can't pretend they are not getting it, because they get my emails fine when my domains sold.

 

[nomen]

Haven't followed this thread that much but looks like the payment issues are gone. Completed a transfer and the payment was sent the same day. Alas.

 

[SpareDomains]

Afternic would be great due to GoDaddy reach. But what good is reach when the whole system is flawed and transactions take weeks to complete. Can wrap my own deals complete from start to finish in 2-3 days.

1) Add domains that fall into pending verification status and they can rot in that status for many many months. Email us and we'll get them listed? How about your pending review actually goes to a human to actually review them within a week or two.

2) Add domains already listed by someone else and ya can't even add them for manual review. Email us and we'll get them listed? Let the domains be added and reviewed by a human for new ownership changes.

Have a current sale that's been sitting for a week+. Let me guess email us and we'll get it going? I'll just wait till the buyer gets mad at you and requests a refund due to incompetence.

Afternic - Home of 20% commission with no human interaction unless you email us

Think I'm willing to just delete 400+ domains from my account and throw away my current sale as I won't be emailing you to get things done. You wan't 20% find some humans to actually work there. GoDaddy reach may be stronger than Sedo but Sedo support actually have humans that review/respond in a timely fashion.