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.​

 

[JudgeMind]

My review of Alter.com after switching ALL of my nameservers to Alter!

Around 2 months ago I decided to test the new direction the alter marketplace is heading and at the end of September I moved all of my non Squadhelp listed domain names to alter (approximately 3000 names)

During October I was quite pleased to close 5 domain sales with alter. Each transaction was seamless and went through without any issues! I typically was selling at another marketplace that charged 20% commission and am happy to have saved close to $800 in commission by selling with alter for just 10% commission!

In November I also completed another 5 sales with alter and again no issues at all with transaction! Again I saved over $1000 in commission!

Also in November, I decided to leave squadhelp after being with them for 3 years. The reasoning here was primarily due to highest commission in the industry and reduced visibility of my portfolio of 800+ names. I may go deeper into my exit from Squadhelp in another post at a later date.

Since leaving squadhelp I had completed 2 sales of my previously listed sh names via alter! Combined savings from these two sales with alters 10% commission was over $1600!!. Funds that I am very happy to have!

I will follow up with an additional review that is more detailed after I’ve spent some more time with alter! Happy holidays!

Also a big thank you to @Deven Patel for your great support and communication!

I will be sharing monthly reports here with you about my alter experience. Happy holidays

 

[Charybdis]

@Deven Patel please don't forget to automatically renew the SSL certificates of the domain names. A lot of certificates expired on Nov 24, 2021 and now these domains return the ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID error when you try to access them via https.

Example: https://gigapen.com/

Your connection is not private​

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from gigapen.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards).

NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID
Subject: gigapen.com
Issuer: R3
Expires on: Nov 24, 2021
Current date: Dec 9, 2021

 

[Embrand]

I noticed a very neat thing. I had removed some names a while ago, but decided to list them again. Not only were my old purchased logos automatically attached to the listings again, but so were the keywords I had assigned. That saved both money and time.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I am very sad to receive this news. I liked Alter landers, site features like their TM search, their commissions, great professional logos, the information they include about branding, and much more.

@Deven Patel is a smart classy guy and set a model for seeking input from the community through NamePros.

I wish Deven the best in his future endeavours.

Bob

 

[william]

For those hoping for @F.E. purchasing Alter, don't hold your breath. Including @Deven Patel. Everything that FE mentioned was a complete lie.

Starting with the 8 figure domain sale, to the acquisition of Alter, to the lawsuit, to the 42 BTC donation.

If you're serious about selling the platform @Deven Patel, find a real buyer. Or better yet, take some of these suggestions from people like @Bob Hawkes and see if you can make another run at it.

 

[OnlineBusiness.com]

I have not had direct contact. Not sure how you tried through Alter contact, DM here or some other way. He is on LinkedIn, and another option would be to try a message contact there.

It is encouraging to hear that others are interested, if indeed the sale has failed. I have no definitive word on the status of that.

I like many of the features of Alter, and have kept a fair number of names pointed there, hoping it will continue.

Bob

Thanks for the reply Bob. Yes I have communicated with him via Linkedin before but what's more concerning is, he should get notifications on this thread. Either way I've already decided to move on from the deal. Just hope he's fine.

 

[Future Sensors]

@Bob Hawkes Here are the names:

https://dns.coffee/nameservers/ns1.alter.com

 

[Nametree]

I signed up and added a few names because the branding, look, feel and 10% commission are attractive - especially when you say, like in your original post, that you are buyer-focused. In my mind, that sounded like you'd be stepping up to invest in outreach and bring buyers to the marketplace.

But then...

From what we're seeing, most buyers are coming in through direct/type-in traffic. All the redirected traffic is pooled together creating a win-win scenario for both buyers and sellers. It gives buyers more options and sellers more leads (i.e. a buyer that landed on domain A may end up buying domain B and vice versa). This is why we're able to offer such a low commission.

That's not promising at all. Basically, you're not doing anything new from any other marketplace, which is, building your own brand value on the back of traffic domainers bring to you. There's nothing innovative about that. If your main differentiator, as you say, is the lower commission, well, you're late to the party - Squadhelp WLM is 7.5%, and Efty+Dan integration is I believe 5%.

If you're here to build something new and different, the only way I see for you to carve yourself a niche is to figure out a way to bring traffic in, and bring more sales. Squadhelp is also ahead of the game on that, as they advertise domains quite well. When you say you're building a community of entrepreneurs, sharing business ideas, etc, that all sounds promising but also quite vague and it all takes investment and time.

I don't mean to be grilling you and I think competition and innovation is always welcome in domaining, but I do want to hear more about your vision and how you intend to differentiate Alter (beyond competing on price/commission, where, already, you are losing.) Specifically, when you say buyer-focused, do you just mean good customer service (vague), or do you mean you'll be working on bringing in more buyers (and how?)

 

[timestamp]

Here is one suggestion for you and your competition:

Charge 30% for every sale, 10% for you, 20% distribute to all sellers who didn't make a sale in a current year. At least they will have some money for renewals, and keep domains pointing at your site.

This is a win-win for all, and not win-win for some.

Mark this date. Let's see how long does it take to implement this.

OK. Ready... Set... GO!

 

[samuel12]

@Deven Patel what's with alter and made up names. You guys rarely accept two keyword brandables, almost all your accepted domains are made up names. Do you have data that prove made-up names sell more or what's the rationale behind this?

 

[Deven Patel]

@Deven Patel what's with alter and made up names. You guys rarely accept two keyword brandables, almost all your accepted domains are made up names. Do you have data that prove made-up names sell more or what's the rationale behind this?

Thanks for asking! Not sure if that's the case. I just checked our listings and around 30-40% of the names are two words. Ultimately, it all depends on the names that sellers actually submit. If good two word names are submitted then we'll certainly accept them.

At the moment we're also giving priority to names that work across multiple industries. Not too keen on names that are super niche. For example, something like "BalloonBlog" is too specific and much less likely to sell than something like "TechBlog". Also, a lot of two word names we see aren't that brandable. See examples below.

Examples that were recently declined (obscured for privacy): DigitalVersify, GreatShroom, BurntLion, StallionFlare

Examples that were recently accepted (actual listings): CuteRoll, PayBlade, KindAim, RealLake, ProudHill

 

[SuperBrander]

@Deven Patel Thanks for the reply about Afternic. I must say that I'm impressed. You guys really stepped up your game. I'm kinda concerned about the amount of sales you guys are having based on the amount of reported sales at NamePros, which is usually a good indicator about how well a marketplace is doing but I'm going to submit a few more names and we'll see how things progress moving forward. Rock on.

 

[Deven Patel]

@Deven Patel It would be great if there is an option to download/export the listed names.

Great suggestion! We'll certainly consider it. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to support if you need a CSV export.

Edit: We just released a bulk export tool that allows you to download a CSV of your listed domains. You can access this tool by logging into your Alter account and then clicking on Domains > Listed > Export CSV (cloud icon found next to the search bar).

I just lowered the price of some of my domains. I wanted to know if potential buyers (people that have shortlisted a domain) are in any way informed about this change?

Great question. Buyers actually don't have user accounts and don't need to submit their email address to us in order to favorite a name so there would be no way for us to reach out to them. We didn't see a point in creating more friction for them in today's privacy-centric environment.

I'm kinda concerned about the amount of sales you guys are having based on the amount of reported sales at NamePros, which is usually a good indicator about how well a marketplace is doing but I'm going to submit a few more names and we'll see how things progress moving forward. Rock on.

Thanks for your continued support! In all fairness, we only have around 3% of the inventory compared to our competitors and most of that is of lower quality names since sellers that own high end names aren't going to switch right away. Long story short, you wouldn't see the same type of sales activity for us on NamePros right now. Also, please note that not all Alter sellers are on NamePros or are comfortable with sharing their sales. In fact, we have sellers who have already sold multiple domains.

The crown ain't safe on who (SH) is wearing it.

Thanks for the compliment but I have high respect and regard for all our competitors. Everyone started at the same place and they're all doing what they need to in order to succeed just like you and I. Competition is the backbone of our economy and necessary for innovation. It forces us to do our best.

Is this normal? http://prntscr.com/y9nwcf http://prntscr.com/y9nwzf
Using edge, no adblock, no zoom

One small thing: When I look at an Alter listed name on my mobile phone, the text in the descriptions seems to jump a bit. Not sure if this is only on some devices.

These UI issues seem device-specific. Can you please reach out to support with information about which device/OS/browser you're experiencing this on?

 

[Deven Patel]

I have never seen in the other marketplaces, a small notification in the submitting form to alert us if is there a backlog of work and reviewing is delayed? or anyway more information to keep seller updated

Thanks for the feedback. We'll consider it.

couple of recommendation...
1) increase the speed tone by around 20% so so its faster. sounds slow and boring atm.

2) allow bulk/all selection of listed domains to be selected to increase/decrease prices and change installment settings.

1. Not sure I understand what you're referring to. Can you please clarify?

2. We'll consider a bulk price change feature. A bulk installment setting feature is already available here.

May I request a feature, that listing my domains at other marketplaces is optional at Alter?

I second this suggestion.

I appreciate the suggestion. We went back to the table and thought about this again. However, the pros still outweighed the cons. In fact, we came up with a few more pros this time. Here's our thought process:

• Simplicity: The beauty of automated partner listings is that sellers don't have to worry about putting more work into managing their portfolios on multiple platforms (i.e. prices are auto synced, domains are delisted at all partners upon a sale, etc). This efficiency benefits both sellers and partners. The productivity boost also increases over time as sellers grow their portfolios. Less time managing the portfolio = more time domaining (finding more quality assets to flip).
• Fairness: We invest a considerable amount of resources into the marketplace (staff, designers, customer service, marketing, development, partnerships, etc). Sellers are able to reap these benefits without spending a dime (no initial fees). When sales occur outside our platform, all the investment we made into promoting those domains is wasted (unlike our competitors who still take their cut). This means the rest of the sellers have to take the hit and eat that cost. And ultimately we would have to raise our commission to compensate for that loss.

As always, I welcome everyone's feedback. We're more than happy to work with everyone for the greater good as long as all parties benefit. A marketplace is a symbiotic relationship between three parties. When that balance breaks, everyone loses.

Deven, any chance you guys could also handle non-premium domains? I would love if I could control the listing and delisting of domains from 1 website...?

Thanks for the suggestion. We may consider it down the road. At this time, we're solely focused on brandables.

It could be more filtering options for buyers: by length, price, category, starts/ends with, contains.

Oh yes, that would be great!

Yup, we have that on our radar. Though at the moment our inventory is too small for this to actually be useful. Our smart search already takes care of this in a much simpler way (i.e. when you search for "tech" you'll see results that start with the keyword first, followed by results that contain the keyword, followed by the rest). The results can also be sorted by popularity, length, price, and filtered by category.

 

[Deven Patel]

Small Update

We just released a feature where any Alter listings you share on social media will automatically be converted into nice previews.

Here's an example on Twitter:

 

[DotKing]

How many months?

This one was listed for around 1 day

 

[Deven Patel]

I think they should have the making offer on the page as not all buyers are smart and can figure out by contacting them.

Thanks so much for the feedback, John!

We did consider it but like @Charybdis and @Bob Hawkes pointed out, evidence suggests BIN listings convert much better. According to GoDaddy, Buy Now results in up to 5X higher sell-through compared to Make Offer (assuming the domain is priced reasonably).

Speaking from my own experience, when I was on the buy-side I used to make lists of domains I liked for my startup ideas along with their prices. Unless it was a domain I was super attached to, I wouldn't bother reaching out to owners because it would end up wasting everyone's time. Make Offer owners had very high expectations and both parties thought they were great negotiators so it was hard to ever come to a consensus. BIN listings made it super easy to rank/compare names and move forward quickly. Time and money are the two most valuable things for a new business so BINs make a ton of sense from that perspective.

Even from the seller's perspective, why not simply assign a price that you want from the start rather than wasting time shuffling through endless spam and lowball offers? You can always change the price if your thought process changes down the road. And you can invest that extra time into expanding your portfolio or spend it with your wife instead.

We also considered the hybrid option seen on some other marketplaces (BIN + Make Offer simultaneously). After discussing that idea with a number of potential buyers, almost all of them said they would always submit an offer if the option was available. Makes sense, I mean if you went to a car dealership and saw a car with a list price of $30k with an option to make an offer, why wouldn't you? On the other hand, if the option didn't exist you would STILL find a way to negotiate the price if it wasn't affordable (in our case through our various contact options).

That said, we're always open to considering all feedback especially if there's data that supports it. So if you ever come across any solid evidence of MO working well with BIN, please don't hesitate to share it with us!

 

[Deven Patel]

Quick announcement everyone...

We heard from a number of sellers who wanted to manage their own listings with our partners for one reason or another (e.g. keep prices consistent across marketplaces, auction domains without having to delist them from Alter, etc). In an effort to give sellers more flexibility, we're making partner syndication optional.

By default, all domains listed on Alter will automatically syndicate to our partners. However, if you prefer you can choose not to syndicate your domains by heading over to your account "Settings" page and then clicking on the "Syndication" button.

So if you like the "all-in-one" approach and the convenience of not having to manage listings across different places then leave syndication on. Otherwise, feel free to turn it off.

Moving forward, the only requirement of listing on Alter is that you use our landing pages. This is so that our marketing efforts aren't wasted if one of our buyers ends up typing a domain into their browser and purchasing it elsewhere.

By the way, here are some interesting insights about the value of landing pages for those who are curious. We had listed 4,000+ premium names with our partners including top tier names priced in the 6-7 figure range. So far after 4 months, we received 0 inquiries through that channel. And in terms of traffic, we estimate that the channel contributed only about 3% of the overall traffic. Go figure!

As always, I wanted to thank everyone for their continued support.

 

[Recons.Com]

But you selected "relevance" without entering any search keyword, it is pointless. You should enter a keyword into the search field, and then select "sort by relevance".

Or if you don't enter any keyword and you want to see the most popular, or best names, then use the sort by most popular option.

I understand that you are either a fanboy or an insider, right?

First, searching by relevance is very relevant in this case. Because, that is basically the default view when a visitor clicks on "more business names" on index page and comes to alter.com/names. This is the HIGHEST exposure view. As most clients won't change the navigation and/or for the ones that do the views would be split among other choices. I mean, come on! Fro/ban and Joi/ti and Just/rix next to Pan?

If they are not relevant, why they are first by "Relevance" for no keyword? And no keyword is perfectly fine for a startup owner that looks for an abstract name or is not sure what direction he is going in namewise.

Second, sorting by popular, is not much better. "Top names" include celc/om, rea/nix, app/nor, bill/axa, show/brook, pro/zom, jiz/ax, Niro/si, hu/tiva etc. On the FIRST page, Carl!!!

 

[karmaco]

I understand that you are either a fanboy or an insider, right?

First, searching by relevance is very relevant in this case. Because, that is basically the default view when a visitor clicks on "more business names" on index page and comes to alter.com/names. This is the HIGHEST exposure view. As most clients won't change the navigation and/or for the ones that do the views would be split among other choices. I mean, come on! Fro/ban and Joi/ti and Just/rix next to Pan?

If they are not relevant, why they are first by "Relevance" for no keyword? And no keyword is perfectly fine for a startup owner that looks for an abstract name or is not sure what direction he is going in namewise.

Second, sorting by popular, is not much better. "Top names" include celc/om, rea/nix, app/nor, bill/axa, show/brook, pro/zom, jiz/ax, Niro/si, hu/tiva etc. On the FIRST page, Carl!!!

I am going to have to agree. My main problem with Alter is we have very different ideas about what is a premium name. I do not have this issue with the other sites. I just gave up after they reject great name after great name and put these mediocre names as “premium”.

 

[Deven Patel]

Would it add any value to have Buyers login? For favorites, installments, reminders, etc.

We thought about this but the pros of not adding that extra friction outweighed the cons. Right now buyers can mark names as favorites, pay using installments, get reminders, and more without having to create yet another online account that they'll never use again. Also, aftermarket buyers typically don't make repeat purchases until a few years down the road when they're starting a new project. So not sure if having their own account would provide any major benefits?

Alter is new company compared to other marketplaces. Do you face any hesitations when buyer needs to transfer bigger amount?

Of course! This is actually true for ALL marketplaces, not just ours. Majority of end buyers don't even know there's such a thing as an aftermarket domain marketplace. Generally, these types of buyers just call us on the phone and we're able to provide assurances (we even offer to use Escrow.com if it helps them). But so far we haven't had a buyer that didn't pull the trigger because of this concern.

This is why we've also invested heavily on landing page elements that help build trust with the buyer like these:

• Social Validation: Buyers can instantly read our 5-star TrustPilot reviews.
• Media Coverage: Buyers can see that Alter was mentioned on top tier publications like Forbes, Inc, WaPo, USA Today, etc.
• Customer Service: Buyers have the option to contact us via live chat/phone/email and talk to a real person instantly.
• Company Background: Buyers can read about our company mission and even see the face of the founder on our about us page.
• Company Location: Being an US-based company has an advantage because buyers can easily take us to court if we mishandle their funds.
• SSL Landers: All pages use HTTPS, including redirects.

Isn't type-in traffic the "secret sauce" of domain marketplaces? The more domains you have, the more type-in traffic you get. I think there is value in lower-priced domains, if you feature the premium domains under the lower-priced standard domains, then they could help to drive more traffic to my premium names

Yes, most marketplaces solely rely on type-in traffic. For us, it's a big chunk but we also generate additional traffic through other marketing channels. Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that super low quality names probably won't bring in any traffic at all and simply dilute the overall quality of the marketplace. For example, I'm not sure how many potential buyers would type something like this in their browser: BossManCatalog.xyz

And if there is a domain investor with a portfolio of lower-priced and more expensive domains at the same time on another marketplace, then that domain investor would more likely migrate to Alter, should you support even lower-priced domains, because then it would be possible to migrate the whole portfolio.

You make an interesting point but do you really think sellers looking to sell high quality names would also have low quality ones in their portfolio? I wonder if there's a poll somewhere on this forum that gives us more insight into this.

And some domain investors like the make offer option instead of the BIN, despite the fact that BIN converts better. I know you said previously that you don't want to enable the make offer option, because it doesn't convert well. I don't use make offer myself, but as I see, a lot of domain investors do, so you might think about introducing the make offer option to attract more inventory (more inventory = more traffic, right?). I saw a fellow Namepros member here who asked about the make offer option, and because it was not available, I see that he left Alter and moved back to another marketplace which supports "make offer". You could reduce the marketing spend on those domains where the buy it now option is not active, if make offer doesn't convert well. Sedo and Dan support make offer, so that's not a problem when syndicating the domains.

Stay tuned.

And I read that offering global payment options in local currencies, on localized checkout page can increase the conversion, isn't it a good idea to partner with a global payment provider? Or is it too expensive?

For example, a German buyer would more likely complete the purchase if he could buy the domain by bank transfer to a local German bank in EUR. Currently a German buyer must pay in USD to a US bank account, which is expensive. I know there is Stripe credit card payment option, but some buyers might still prefer bank transfer. And there are local payment methods which are popular in certain countries, for example SOFORT Banking is popular in Germany. And in other countries ewallets are more popular, such as AliPay, Apple Pay etc. Supporting all these local payment methods is a huge task, but there are global payment providers who offer this.

It absolutely helps and it's on our roadmap. Though so far it hasn't been a deal breaker for any buyer. Also, we already accept Apple Pay.

Regarding German buyers not being able to wire money in USD, are you sure about that? I would think their bank would just charge them a small fee for the currency conversion just like how US banks charge us the fee when we make purchases in other currencies.

Sav 4%, Efty with Dan 5% + 2% cc fees, Squadhelp Whitelabel 7.5%

It's definitely possible to get the fees lower.

Even at 6% I might be willing to give Alter a try.
But I am looking for the following.

SSL landing pages.
No leakage to other peoples domains. i.e no links to other names on landing pages.
Payment plan options.

If you could offer those you would take a lot of Dan's marketshare IMO.
Even if you making 2-3%. If you get enough volume could grow into big business.

I think you're only looking at the rates without considering the actual benefits you receive at each of those places. Please correct me if I'm wrong but here's my understanding of your examples:

• Sav 4% - They seem like they're giving away the service for free to gain market share which I'm not sure is sustainable in the long run. They also don't do any additional marketing, don't support payment plans, and don't protect you against chargebacks.
• Efty + DAN 7% - They don't do any additional marketing, don't support payment plans, and you have to pay a monthly fee to use Efty.
• SH WL 7.5% - They don't do any additional marketing unless you pay 30% commission and don't protect you against chargebacks.
• DAN 9% - It seems like during their last update they decided to add a 2% CC processing fee which essentially makes their rate 11%.

Most of the places above also charge withdrawal/processing fees for PayPal/wires/etc which can easily be over 1% of your proceeds.

Our 10% rate is all-inclusive and we support payment plans, handle chargebacks, offer attractive landing pages with logos (free professional logos for premium), syndicate your domains, and do additional marketing to get more exposure for your domains.

If you have any ideas on how we can further reduce our fees without cutting benefits, I'm all ears!

Regarding traffic leakage, based on our experience 80-90% of buyers don't care about other options. And the rest of the 10-20% that do will find other options regardless of how much you try to lock them in thanks to Google (just search for something like "domain name marketplace" to see what I mean). Nobody's going to spend thousands of dollars on something without thoroughly researching all available alternatives. I mean just think about how much research you do to acquire your own domains. These buyers are future businessmen after all.

Besides, if traffic leakage was really a problem Afternic would be completely out of business because anytime someone searches for the keywords in your domain there, they're presented with countless other alternatives in different extensions that cost 100X less (registration fee). Instead, Afternic is one of the top performing marketplaces.

The other thing to consider is that right now all the traffic is pooled together. So if a buyer landed on our marketplace through someone else's domain, they may end up purchasing yours instead. This strategy plus our additional marketing helps boost a domain's traffic by up to 80% compared to just receiving type-in traffic and locking the visitors into just that domain. Why would you want to willingly lose out on this extra exposure?

How does everyone else feel about this? We could certainly introduce an option not to display other domains on the landing page if a lot of sellers still think it's beneficial somehow. Of course, that would mean we'd have to disable your domains from showing up on other landing pages to keep things fair to those sellers who've opted in to receive more traffic.

 

[Charybdis]

2-3% of millions per month in sales. Think big.

You can't do millions of sales without marketing and brand building. And marketing and brand building are expensive. You need to market to both domainers and end users at the same time.

There are marketplaces who charge only 2-8%, but I simply don't trust them. Their landing pages are not good. I don't think end-users trust them either. So I wouldn't list my domains there. Without brand building it won't work.

But at the same time I don't want to pay too much commission either. I think this 10% commission for so many features is the sweet spot for me.

 

[gina ferrano]

The search function is still a bit off. Let's say you have a 10 L two-word name, and to test I search under one of the keywords. What I find is it's buried on page 10 and 99% of the 'premiums' that come up before it, don't have the keyword, so no connection to the search. That combined with the 6 keyword cap, while premiums have 3X as many makes it frustrating. On another note, I do appreciate the stats to discover some of my names are in fact mostly type-ins and 3rd party.

Question: if I upload my own logo (still on the fence about the $5 logo fee) the name may be placed sooner in the results. Does it make a difference? Other than one person mentioning a sale on the slack channels/NP's. I haven't heard about any sales on Alter. Especially the non-premiums.

 

[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.

 

[Lord Antares]

Some questions.

If there is no manual curation, what stops people from submitting a bunch of non-brandable, subpar domains on the marketplace? Is your automatic tool really going to be able to differentiate them from domains which should be on a brandable domain marketplace?

What differentiates your marketplace from any other at this point? It's more like DAN or Afternic with added logos.

And most importantly, hear me out:

Why would somebody list their domains for syndication on your marketplace? You list on DAN, for example, so that sellers don't need to do that themselves. HOWEVER, you mark up the domains thereby reducing the sellers' STR. Why on earth wouldn't a seller list their domains on DAN themselves with the original price?

You're essentially just taking a cut in return for saving us a little bit of time. Correct me if I'm wrong.