Alter.com Marketplace

[Deven Patel]

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.​

 

[Debasis]

why dont you offer a buyer request panel ?

 

[NorthernDomains]

I just noticed domains I list at Alter get removed from Dan.

 

[ddesigns]

I just noticed domains I list at Alter get removed from Dan.

Because alter list those names under there name on Dan and hence it will get removed from your dashboard. Same thing will happen at Sedo too..

Hope it helps

 

[wwwulff]

Sold my first name via Alter - Mouty/com $5,399 (Premium listing) - Great experience, Thanks to Alter

 

[ddesigns]

Sold my first name via Alter - Mouty/com $5,399 (Premium listing) - Great experience, Thanks to Alter

Mind sharing more details pls like hold time and acquisition cost pls..

 

[Domain boy]

Hello! which domain extensions are accepted on Alter?

Also, have you considered the idea of having Alter owned domains? people send domains available for registration and if after acceptance they get sold the people who submitted the domains earn a commission.

Thank you!

 

[wwwulff]

Mind sharing more details pls like hold time and acquisition cost pls..

Caught it via a backorder in 2012 for $59 so I have hold it for many years

 

[ddesigns]

Hello! which domain extensions are accepted on Alter?

Also, have you considered the idea of having Alter owned domains? people send domains available for registration and if after acceptance they get sold the people who submitted the domains earn a commission.

Thank you!

As per my knowledge all extensions are accepted in Alter, regarding the commission stuff, it works only on Squadhelp. They only provide commission on un registered domains which they register on your behalf.

 

[Deven Patel]

Hi everyone.. we just released some major improvements!

As always, we'd like to thank you for using Alter to sell your domain names. We truly appreciate your continued support.

We're always listening to all your feedback and trying to make our marketplace the best that we possibly can for you. We're excited to announce a number of new improvements!

Rethinking Premium

After our last big announcement, we received a lot of valuable feedback from sellers regarding our premium selection process. A lot of sellers felt like the process was unfair when their names weren't chosen. Since there was no real consensus on what high quality actually meant, we couldn't make everyone happy. Additionally, buyers don't seem to care about this because we've sold just as many premium domains as non-premium.

So after careful consideration, we've decided to drop the premium label altogether. We will no longer review names manually. Instead, we built a smarter search algorithm that uses a number of factors to rank names based on buyer feedback rather than our or the seller's opinion.

Everything from the domain's extension, length, price, brandability, popularity, and more will be used to determine its rank. Just like the Google search algorithm, we'll continually adjust it over time based on buyer feedback to ensure an optimal experience and high STR.

Based on our initial testing, the algorithm is working very well and often better than our manual curation process! This means high quality names will continue to thrive while giving new listings an equal opportunity (just like SEO).

Make Offer

You can now accept offers for your domain names! Make Offer can be enabled for all your domains in bulk or for each individual domain by clicking on its Change Price button and setting a minimum offer value. Once enabled, you will be able to negotiate directly with buyers from your Alter control panel.

Our new Offers page will show you all the new and existing offers for your domains. You will also be able to see the buyer's name, country, and partial email address to help you negotiate like a pro!

Appraisals

Say hello to our free AI-powered domain appraisal tool! We've engineered it from the ground up to estimate the value of any domain name using a variety of factors including millions of historical sales. And the best part of it all is that it's built right inside our control panel for easy access.

Paypal & Crypto

Who doesn't love flexibility? We've added new payment methods to our marketplace! In addition to credit cards and wire transfers, buyers can now purchase domains using PayPal and a variety of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and more.

Similar Names

We've replaced the Featured Names section with Similar Names across all landing pages to help improve the browsing experience for buyers and generate more relevant traffic for sellers.

That said, we understand that a number of sellers don't like this idea for one reason or another so we've made it optional. You can toggle this feature on or off by heading over to Settings > Similar Names. Please note that disabling this feature will reduce traffic to your own listings and may lower your sell-through rate so we highly recommend leaving it on.

Google Analytics

Although our built-in dashboard already provides valuable insights, you can now see more detailed traffic data for your landing pages through Google Analytics. Simply enter your Tracking ID and/or Measurement ID under Settings > Google Analytics to set it up.

Bulk Tools

We've made it even easier to manage domains in bulk. Simply click on the Manage Domains button found on the Domains page to access the new bulk tools.

Alter Benefits

Our goal has always been to offer the most value for the least cost. With these improvements, we've blown past that goal. To quickly recap, below are all the benefits you receive at Alter in return for our low all-inclusive 10% commission:

• Domain Logos: Names with logos help your listings stand out from the crowd which is proven to increase sales. You can use our logo designer to create them for free, upload your own for free, or even order professional designs directly from your account.
• More Exposure: In addition to type-in traffic, your domains are marketed via PPC, SEO, social media, remarketing, and more.
• Installment Plans: Buyers can pay using monthly installments spread over 3-36 months which is proven to increase STR.
• Concierge Service: During a sale, we hold the domain securely in our own registrar account to ensure safe delivery to the buyer.
• Syndication: Your domains are automatically listed on over 650 partner marketplaces and registrars for maximum exposure.
• SSL Redirects: Our platform automatically redirects traffic through HTTPS links so you don't miss out on any leads.
• Traffic Breakdown: We show you exactly how much traffic we're generating for your portfolio directly on your dashboard.
• Customer Service: Buyers have the option to contact us via live chat/phone/email and talk to a real person instantly.
• Social Validation: Our 5-star TrustPilot reviews and mentions on top tier publications like Forbes, Inc, WaPo, and USA Today help establish credibility with buyers.
• Chargeback Protection: Your sales are protected against fraudulent disputes. We got your back!
• No Hidden Fees: Our commission is all-inclusive with no other hidden processing fees that may scare away buyers.

We're confident that these improvements will further enhance our marketplace and ultimately generate more sales for you. If you have any feedback or concerns, please feel free to reach out at any time.

 

[Samxui]

I can see the *domain appraisal* feature in the Menu bar.
Looks good.

Edit: seems the appraisal doesn't work well for 2 word combinations.
Example: SmartShop .com & ShopSmart .com have appraisals of $389.

 

[Charybdis]

Overall great improvements!

But sadly you no longer design logos for free, don't you? It's actually a price increase for sellers, because previously the logo design was free for premium names, now sellers must pay 5 USD / logo.

Could you please continue designing logos for free for those domains which were selected as "premium quality" by your AI? It is also your best interest to sell as many domains and as quickly as possible, and the logos help to highlight great domains. But if sellers won't pay the extra fees for the logo design, then these domains will have less chance to sell.

And I miss the free appraisals, too. Could you please introduce a paid appraisal option? For example, manual appraisal could cost 1 USD / domain, and then you would manually appraise a domain and suggest a price tag. My problem now is that the automated appraisal tool is not that accurate, and you no longer suggest a price tag in case of premium domains, so sellers are now in the dark about how to price a domain.

There are 3 small bugs:

1) in case of previously premium names, on the similar names section you list the same domain name as well which is displayed on the landing page. For example: https://alter.com/names/pan.com
As you can see, the same domain name, pan.com is listed again under the "Similar Business Names" section.

2) And the other issue: you display the phone number in a format which is confusing.

Please display the phone number on the landing pages in numbers only and include the international country calling code as well. Non-US visitors won't be able to call this number in this format. And people have smartphones which display numbers only when dialing a number, so displaying a phone number with letters is confusing, it only applies to old phones when there were both letters and numbers on the buttons (now smartphones don't even have buttons anymore).

3) third bug: if you insert a space before the search query by mistake, then Alter won't be able to recognize the keyword and it will display the default view only.

Example:

https://alter.com/names?q=+tech
As you can see, there is an extra space before the word tech. In this case, the search results are not related to tech, but this is the default view only.

Now without the extra space:
https://alter.com/names?q=tech

it works now. But that extra space shouldn't affect the search results, just remove spaces before and after the search query before displaying the results.

 

[SuperBrander]

Congrats on the latest improvements. They seem like a good step in the right direction. Personally I didn't like the whole premium vs non premium concept. I went to Alter now to see how things look after the latest change. After sorting by price high to low, I got extremely bizarre results. Some insane prices for bad domains alongside high end dictionary words. So even if the new algorithm is working well in other aspects, the sort by price option is totally wacky at the moment due to the mix of domains that were curated by Alter mixed in with domains people added and assigned their own prices to. I don't know how a potential buyer can sort by price without being confused by this. @Deven Patel Can you please comment about this matter? Thanks.

 

[Charybdis]

I don’t see the option making offer from the landing page. Am missing something?

@johnn now Alter supports the make offer option.

 

[tomcarl]

Great update and improvements! Hoping to see a search by category display but maybe on next one.

 

[ddesigns]

This are indeed features that you @Deven Patel have come up with in Alter. I am sure its going to give a run to the competitors. My half portfolio is at Alter currently and seeing good traffic (both direct and partner network). I would like to know how accurate will be the Appraisal that you have integrated in the site, I tested it today for one of my name and it showed 5000 USD, same name was appraised by Brandpa for 1000 USD and was rejected by SH So just wanted to know how accurate they are, as it will help us in pricing the names.

Also the traffic that we see daily, is this the real "human" traffic or it counts bots as well? Because one name that I have parked on Alter showed 600+ traffic in one day and from second day it was not showing any traffic/less traffic.

I'll be happy if you guide on this.

Wishing you best of luck with the new updates, Waiting for 1st sale on Alter and then will move all my domains here

Keep rocking..

 

[Deven Patel]

seems the appraisal doesn't work well for 2 word combinations.
Example: SmartShop .com & ShopSmart .com have appraisals of $389.

Sorry about that! There was a bug that we didn't catch during deployment which impacted all the appraisals. We released a fix around midnight last night. Now those names are appraised at $5,265 and $2,003 respectively which is much more reasonable.

But sadly you no longer design logos for free, don't you? It's actually a price increase for sellers, because previously the logo design was free for premium names, now sellers must pay 5 USD / logo.

Could you please continue designing logos for free for those domains which were selected as "premium quality" by your AI? It is also your best interest to sell as many domains and as quickly as possible, and the logos help to highlight great domains. But if sellers won't pay the extra fees for the logo design, then these domains will have less chance to sell.

You're right unfortunately. I do understand your concern but I don't think it's a price increase because all other companies that do offer it for free charge you 30% commission (3X more than us).

At first this was a symptom of us no longer curating names manually. But then we dug into our data and realized that the free logos resulted in a major loss for us too because sellers often jumped from one marketplace to another without any consequences (thus a lot of the money we spent on logos was wasted).

I absolutely agree logos make a difference which is why we offer our logo designer for free and you can upload your own logos for free as well. If you still prefer a professional logo, you can get one at cost (actually we still take a loss on them because we don't charge you processing fees which can be up to 10% + the amount of manual work involved in reviewing them, logos often take multiple revisions to get right).

And I miss the free appraisals, too. Could you please introduce a paid appraisal option? For example, manual appraisal could cost 1 USD / domain, and then you would manually appraise a domain and suggest a price tag. My problem now is that the automated appraisal tool is not that accurate, and you no longer suggest a price tag in case of premium domains, so sellers are now in the dark about how to price a domain.

We can certainly look into this depending on how many other sellers want it. However, our tool is pretty good. We tested a lot of our existing listings against it and majority of them were appraised very well. There was a bug when we first launched so you may not have gotten the right appraisals. We released a fix last night so try now.

in case of previously premium names, on the similar names section you list the same domain name as well which is displayed on the landing page. For example: https://alter.com/names/pan.com
As you can see, the same domain name, pan.com is listed again under the "Similar Business Names" section.

Thanks for pointing this out. We did notice that but decided to keep it that way because this has more pros than cons. A major pro being the name the visitor is interested in gets retargeted back to them. Also, as more related names are added to our marketplace, the chances of the same name appearing there will decrease.

Please display the phone number on the landing pages in numbers only and include the international country calling code as well. Non-US visitors won't be able to call this number in this format. And people have smartphones which display numbers only when dialing a number, so displaying a phone number with letters is confusing, it only applies to old phones when there were both letters and numbers on the buttons (now smartphones don't even have buttons anymore).

Noted. The reason we display the letters is for memorability. It's much easier to remember the phrase than the individual digits (like 800-FLOWERS for example). For visitors who are looking to call in instantly, they can just click on the number and their mobile device will automatically dial the correct version. But of course, if we see that buyers are getting confused then we'll certainly change it.

if you insert a space before the search query by mistake, then Alter won't be able to recognize the keyword and it will display the default view only.

Example:

https://alter.com/names?q=+tech
As you can see, there is an extra space before the word tech. In this case, the search results are not related to tech, but this is the default view only.

Thanks for reporting this. It should be fixed now.

Congrats on the latest improvements. They seem like a good step in the right direction. Personally I didn't like the whole premium vs non premium concept. I went to Alter now to see how things look after the latest change. After sorting by price high to low, I got extremely bizarre results. Some insane prices for bad domains alongside high end dictionary words. So even if the new algorithm is working well in other aspects, the sort by price option is totally wacky at the moment due to the mix of domains that were curated by Alter mixed in with domains people added and assigned their own prices to. I don't know how a potential buyer can sort by price without being confused by this. @Deven Patel Can you please comment about this matter? Thanks.

Thanks for the compliments! Regarding sorting by price, it's an unfortunate symptom of dropping the premium label. We also wanted to treat all domains equally as we received complaints from sellers that their non-premium names weren't showing up when sorted by price in the past.

However, that's not going to have much negative impact because sort by "relevance" is used majority of the times. Based on our findings buyers almost never sort by price without filtering the names down further using the search bar first so they'll never want to sort our entire inventory by price. And in the rare event that they do, they would simply use the price filter to weed out the outliers.

That said, if you or anyone else has a better way of dealing with this please feel free to share your thoughts. We're always learning and more than happy to consider your ideas.

Great update and improvements! Hoping to see a search by category display but maybe on next one.

Thanks for the compliments and feedback! By categories, do you mean something like what's already in our footer where buyers can click on a category to search within it?

This are indeed features that you @Deven Patel have come up with in Alter. I am sure its going to give a run to the competitors. My half portfolio is at Alter currently and seeing good traffic (both direct and partner network). I would like to know how accurate will be the Appraisal that you have integrated in the site, I tested it today for one of my name and it showed 5000 USD, same name was appraised by Brandpa for 1000 USD and was rejected by SH So just wanted to know how accurate they are, as it will help us in pricing the names.

Also the traffic that we see daily, is this the real "human" traffic or it counts bots as well? Because one name that I have parked on Alter showed 600+ traffic in one day and from second day it was not showing any traffic/less traffic.

I'll be happy if you guide on this.

Wishing you best of luck with the new updates, Waiting for 1st sale on Alter and then will move all my domains here

Keep rocking..

Appreciate the compliments, thanks! No matter the tool you use, you will always have to use your personal judgement to make the final call with automated appraisals. That said, we did test a lot of our existing listings against the tool and majority of them were appraised very well. There was a bug when we first launched so you may not have gotten the right appraisals yesterday. Can you please try now? Also, feel free to DM that domain to me. Now I'm curious.

 

[Keith DeBoer]

"Your domains are automatically listed on over 650 partner marketplaces and registrars."

Deven, This is quite a huge benefit. Does this mean Alter auto-propagates listings to the Afternic network or is it some other network.? Or ??? Can you give us more details please?

Thanks!

Keith

 

[Charybdis]

"Your domains are automatically listed on over 650 partner marketplaces and registrars."

Deven, This is quite a huge benefit. Does this mean Alter auto-propagates listings to the Afternic network or is it some other network.? Or ??? Can you give us more details please?

Thanks!

Keith

Syndication means that your domain will be automatically listed on Sedo (without Sedo MLS) and on Dan.
And then Sedo will list your domain automatically at the partner domain name registrars.

But Afternic doesn't support this, so then you have to manually list your domain on Afternic Fast Transfer.

 

[Charybdis]

I tested the free AI-powered domain appraisal tool by Alter, and it is pretty good! In fact I have never seen an automated appraisal tool before which is as accurate as Alter's. Try it out with a few domains, it can appraise domains pretty accurately.

But it is an automated tool, so it is not perfect of course, but it is a good, free tool to give you a baseline for an appraisal.

However I found out that combining a strong keyword with random characters will get high appraisal values, let's take the word "home" and combine with random characters:

Homewqkf.com: $3,754
Homeiiii.com: $4,030
Homemmmm.com: $4,754
Homewquu.com: $2,597

It would be useful to list the appraisal values automatically next to each domain name in our portfolio on the "Domains" tab.

Could you offer bulk appraisals? So a textarea where I can enter multiple domains at a time and then the tool would appraise them in bulk with one click.

And a more detailed report would be awesome. For example you could list the following things in the appraisal report:
- number of words
- number of syllables
- trademark report
- Cambridge dictionary meaning of the words (if applicable)
- search volume of the words on Google
- number of other TLDs registered and the actual list of other taken TLDs
- Google Trends report
- domain creation date
- number of Crunchbase companies using the text in their names
- Namebio past sales

 

[NorthernDomains]

I tested the free AI-powered domain appraisal tool by Alter

Yes, the tool. They actually limit the number of searches you can do.