Alter.com Brandable Marketplace

@Deven Patel Thanks. No argue about the high commissions. Lower commissions are always better, so if you can deliver the same results or better- then Alter would be the better option to choose. As for the examples you gave of dictionary words- while two of the options you gave are indeed words that aren't very usable- Kicking.com is a great word and a domain that can command a mid $XX,XXX price and perhaps even higher. A popular, short and energetic word. 'Kickstart', 'Kicking Off' something, 'alive and kicking' come to mind etc. Not to mention highly applicable to the most popular sport in the world (Soccer/Football), martial arts etc. So... not a good example, IMO. Daring.com just sold for 48K.

As for your own domains included- l understand why you guys incorporated them to get things going but like I said, I'm not a fan of that. If you're transparent about it and will make sure that all domains are treated equally then it is what it is. With BB it created a lot of issues and mistrust. SH, to the best of my knowledge, only has one domain that's 100% theirs.

 

Also, what's with the weird price tags?

$249,196
$6,602
$27,946
etc.

Why not round up or end in nines? I thought there was a science to that.

 

Agreed. Regarding the appraisals, I was merely comparing the top tier names like Apple/Oracle/Alphabet to ones that are difficult to see as company names. Regarding Kicking.com, it's good but not great because it has a negative connotation but I agree with an appraisal in the low-mid $XX,XXX range. On the other hand, Daring.com is much better because of its positive connotation so the $48K sale price is justified.

Also, keep in mind that some of the historical sales you see are outliers. They don't always reflect market value. There will always be cases where a buyer is super attached to the name and is willing to pay much more than market value for it. But that means the seller has to be willing to hold on to the names for as long as it takes and shoot for the moon as they say. High risk, high reward.

 

We thought we'd try something different for a change. Sometimes it's good to mix things up.

But rest assured that if we discover this doesn't work as well, we'll definitely change it. Our goal is to make data driven decisions.

Edit: Prices have been updated.

 

"What cash out methods do you support?
We support PayPal and wire transfers for amounts larger than $5,000 USD. Once payment is requested, we'll process it within 24-72 hours. "

Please consider editing the text to make it clear that it's only the wire transfers that require a $5000 threshold. I understand it's not a big deal but at times these small things do count. Thanks.

 

Good point. Changed!

 

I'm not sure how you will differentiate from the other marketplaces. But it's nice to see a bit of humor on a domain marketplace: Specifying that the "dramatic office building" pictured on listings is not included in the price

 

Hello Deven...

Good points to know your ambitions, you can build a smart team , the team only have one tasks : Know more and learn more about the targetted companies. Because we can't change their name when we never know about their main mission, so they would never said "who you are and why you ask us to change everything"

 

Hah, thanks! Differentiation comes in many forms. We're already differentiating on the price/commission (10% with Alter vs 30-35% elsewhere). I mean if that's not enough, we'd be happy to charge 30% and promise you the world like the rest.

 

Thanks! I appreciate the compliments.

 

This is honestly a very good idea. Not sure about 20%, or if it should be more like 5% gets split between all other sellers on the site with some type of ratio based on "overall marketplace value". But would help satisfy sellers who are going through a dry streak by getting them a bit of residual income to help manage renewals and stay hopeful.

 

If other marketplaces are charging 30% and sellers use them, then no one would complain about 20% going to all other sellers who didn't make a sale.

If you don't implement this for a new marketplace, then you are simply just another marketplace. Even if you charge 1% or 0% fee.

Empower people by actually giving them money. Sounds like a project for epik. They already have masterbucks in place to distribute the money.
@Rob Monster

And it will be a good indicator at how good marketplace performs. If you didn't make a sale in a year and you have $0 in your acoount that tells you everything.

 

I love the outside the box thinking! But IMHO, I don't think it would work because not all sellers are the same. Some sellers invest heavily into building a quality portfolio while others buy everything in sight. Quality vs quantity. Would it be fair to take 20% of the profits from high quality sellers and hand them over to low quality sellers? Why would high quality sellers agree to this rather than just put that extra 20% in their own pockets?

I do like the charitable component of this but shouldn't it be the seller's responsibility to plan for a rainy day? And the additional profits they generate due to the lower commission should help drastically with that, no? After all, execution is the name of the game in business.

Anyway, as a data driven person I don't want my personal opinion to influence the decision. I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks before jumping to conclusions. So please share your thoughts everyone!

 

I agree with you here. It would also invite all kinds abuse. I imagine people would be making multiple accounts in order to get a larger share of the money. It just creates more negatives than positives.

But all in all, I agree with one of the previous posters here. Direct type ins being your primary source of traffic, I don't feel like the site brings much to the table. It's sort of like a landing page with a free logo. Yes, there's a small chance that someone might run into your domain through the website but someone might also be diverted into another person's domain from your landing page.

Type ''brandable domain marketplace'' into google. Then type in ''brandable domains'' then ''buy brands'' etc. The top results are what you'd expect: brandpa, brandbucket, squadhelp etc. The reason why people list on such websites is because they can attract traffic they otherwise wouldn't be able to achieve and thus will achieve higher STR for your domains (at the cost of commission).

Picking up traffic from type ins is nothing. Anybody can achieve that. I can make a blank website, tell people to redirect their domains to mine and I will have type in traffic. This is why I feel like marketing (like google adwords for those search terms, namepros banners, targeted ads etc.) is the only way to go for this type of site. This is what I think prevents it from becoming a category killer site.

This is my most honest bottomline opinion.

 

Thanks for chiming in! I appreciate your thoughts.

It seems like there is a misconception here. Again, I'm not saying we're counting on direct traffic as our only source of marketing. I'm saying that direct traffic already accounts for a bulk of the traffic on these brandable marketplaces. Yet they charge an outrageous commission. My point is that the additional marketing they say they're doing can be done for much cheaper and isn't worth the extra 20%+ in commission. Of course we're going to utilize other marketing channels. There's no doubt about that!

Every company spends money differently. Our goal is to be as efficient as possible with everything from our overhead to marketing through more innovative approaches. We're also willing to reinvest most of our profits back into the business for long term growth. All of this essentially means the sellers get the same exact benefits as on the other marketplaces but at 3X less cost.

By the way, do you have any concrete data that shows what percentage of sales are coming through direct vs other marketing channels on those other marketplaces? We have tried some of those other marketing channels briefly and direct/type-in won hands down. It actually makes sense when you think about it. How many entrepreneurs you know find domains for their business on social media or through PPC or through banner ads? Keywords like ''brandable domain marketplace'' and ''brandable domains'' work very well with sellers but majority of buyers have no clue what the terms really mean. I have started countless projects in the past and have always found domains directly by visiting their landing pages (type-in). Anyway, we still plan on utilizing the other marketing channels but just more efficiently (i.e. use them to enhance our inbound marketing efforts instead).

So even though the other marketing channels don't account for a huge chunk of sales we still plan on utilizing them because ultimately our goal is to sell as many domains as possible. Why would we leave anything on the table?

And let's talk about data. Here's something interesting. I had listed a few of my own domains with a big competitor (brandable marketplace) in the past and then moved those domains over to Alter once we launched. Here's the traffic comparison between the two:

If this competitor was really investing time and effort into individually marketing my domains they would've received much more traffic, no? Now we do market our domains too but our marketing budget is much smaller than our competitors at this point yet the data shows opposite results. So we must be doing something right? Maybe we’re utilizing other innovative marketing channels as we speak that our competitors haven’t even discovered yet.

 

I agree with this. In fact, I said this in a different thread some time ago but people shot me down saying that it's absolutely worthwhile to list on brandable marketplaces. Shrug.

Well, there is this:

https://www.similarweb.com/website/brandbucket.com/

https://www.similarweb.com/website/squadhelp.com/

It would seem that you are right. I don't know how accurate the data on here is but it suggests that you are right. I suppose direct traffic includes redirects, otherwise it wouldn't make sense. For brandbucket, only 14.3% search traffic, less than 1% for ads and social. The biggest search them being the site name itself and I suppose some of the searches would be exactly what they want (i.e. ''how do I choose my business name'' etc.) but it's a small percentage.

For Squadhelp, it's a different story. They actually have a little bit more search traffic than direct traffic but if you exclude site name searches, it would be less. Still, it seems like they do get some real search traffic which would be consistent with my search (squadhelp ranks higher for a lot of the searches).

But all in all, it seems as though you're right about direct traffic, if similarweb is to be trusted. This would make me reevaluate the benefits that brand marketplaces provide with such a high commission.

This one is easy. You have far less names, therefore each domain gets more hits due to the traffic being spread over fewer names. I was reading some guy's post the other day and he just complained about how he lost a lot of traffic to his names after the brandable market in question grew in size and popularity and was pondering whether it was useful to use them anymore. At least I think that should be it as there is no other reason domains would get a decrease in visits if most of the traffic comes from directs, right?

 

Correct, but my point was that we do take advantage of other marketing channels right now otherwise the numbers would be similar if we had only relied on direct traffic.

In terms of each domain losing traffic as the marketplace grows, that's inevitable. When a marketplace is new, there's more demand than supply so you see higher conversion rates. Later on, there's more supply than demand so the conversion rate drops. We have an idea on how to fix this but at the risk of being prematurely criticized I'm going to keep it to myself for now.

 

That is normal because your marketplace is still small while the competitor marketplace is big, which means your names can be found easier in search or browsing.

Type in traffic will be the same regardless of where you point your domains, if you do not do any type of advertising or marketing then the only source for extra traffic will be the search after type-in traffic (one domain can bring traffic to another...etc.)

 

I thought the point was how many people who land on a domain end up browsing other domains (which would result in higher traffic for a smaller marketplace). In any case, I'm glad you have plans, I'm glad you are researching on marketing etc. I will be following.

 

So then there is a benefit to using a newer marketplace right? If the goal of the seller is to get their domains across more qualified leads then mission accomplished!

Correct, but as I mentioned above we do take advantage of other marketing channels and will invest more resources into the ones that we think work best. After all, our goal is to ultimately get more sales.

 

I just want to let you know that your reset password function doesn't seem to be working.
Yesterday, I made my account at Alter. After making it, I confirmed via the email confirmation link. Then I went to log in but it says the password doesn't match.

I guess I mistyped the password when making the account. A confirm password field wouldn't hurt but ok. Anyway, I clicked on the forgot password link and it said that I received an email with my new password. However, your site only resent the now redundant confirm email mail. I tried resetting just now twice, but I don't get any mails any more at all.

Just thought you should know about this.

 

I just tested it and it seems to be working fine for me. When you enter your account email on our password reset page you should receive an email with instructions on how to reset it.

Can you please reach out to [email protected] regarding this so they can help you with your specific issue?

 

So we did some A/B testing and it turns out you're right. Buyers did prefer a more simpler price tag. We just updated all our prices to reflect that so now all of them end in a 9. Thanks for all your great feedback!

 

I just sign up

You must add a description field for each domain want we submit. because as a seller i must have a reason why this domain is good and you should consider it. For example, the abbreviation WFH dot something, you dont know WHF stands for, so there must be a description to make a better decision

I just submitted a 7 letter domain but it's an abbreviation, I don't know if it will work on your platform or rejected. You didn't give me the description column to explain the abbreviation

 

Thanks so much for signing up! That's a good idea and we had thought about it but decided to keep the process super simple for sellers. However, please note that we do research the names during the approval process so rest assured if it's a popular enough word then we'll know about it.

Also, in the rare event that the name falls through the cracks and you strongly feel it should've been accepted then just contact us and we'll take a look again.