NameSilo

Alter.com Marketplace

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Deven Patel

Founder, Alter.comEstablished Member
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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.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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Thank you very much for your detailed reply :) I'm very optimistic about Alter, and I'll keep submitting domains. I hope the platform is slowly turning into a strong competitor of the "giants", Brandbucket and Squadhelp :) By the way, are you planning to start a newsletter for sellers? Or there's already one and I don't know about it? :)

Thanks for the compliments and support!

Although we don't have a newsletter per se, we do send out important announcements via email when necessary. Our thought process is that people receive too many emails already, we don't want to add to the clutter unless we have something important to share. :)
 
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My first sale on Alter.com
Transaction went smoothly.
All payments received.
 

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My first sale on Alter.com
Transaction went smoothly.
All payments received.

Congrats and thanks for sharing!

Congrats - Nice to see a sale from Alter - Hopefully more will follow soon

We're doing everything we can to get more sales and appreciate your continued support. Also, not sure if you're aware but there are a bunch of other sales mentioned in this thread already. :)
 
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@xeroox This is already on our list but we haven't had a chance to seriously think about the pros and cons yet. For instance, buyers typically don't like their purchases being disclosed (see the recent angel.com sale conversation). On the other hand, I can see some of the benefits for sellers. Maybe we can come up with a solution that helps both sides. Anyway, TBD.

Our focus right now is on testing different marketing channels and producing sales. :)
 
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@xeroox This is already on our list but we haven't had a chance to seriously think about the pros and cons yet. For instance, buyers typically don't like their purchases being disclosed (see the recent angel.com sale conversation). On the other hand, I can see some of the benefits for sellers. Maybe we can come up with a solution that helps both sides. Anyway, TBD.

Our focus right now is on testing different marketing channels and producing sales. :)
Thanks I can understand the issue. I don't know if it's already filtered but is the "traffic" filtering ourself/logged in users?
 
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I don't know if it's already filtered but is the "traffic" filtering ourself/logged in users?

We try to filter out all the bot traffic from the visitor data you see in your account but we do not filter out logged in traffic because it's still real human visitors.

Also, note that we only show unique visitors so multiple repeat visits from the same person to the same domain aren't counted. In other words, if you see 10 visitors next to your domain, it means 10 different humans viewed it.
 
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I guess then Alter's taste has altered :D I'm not sure what the real explanation is, but my best guess is that in the past they wanted to increase the inventory to a certain level (this doesn't mean they accepted junk names, but they accepted most good names), but now as they gained more experience on what sells, they narrowed down the types of names they accept.

Anyway, has anyone here sold any names on Alter? I only have a few names there (28, average listing time is just 3 months) to already have one.

I sold my first name recently on Alter for buy now price. The transaction went smoothly. Have 80 names with them...
 
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I'd like to suggest search field in results pages of Alter catalog. Right now visitor needs to go back to homepage to search for another term. I think it would increase user experience.
Anyway platform is beautiful and promising. Keep up good work!
 
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I'd like to suggest search field in results pages of Alter catalog. Right now visitor needs to go back to homepage to search for another term. I think it would increase user experience.
Anyway platform is beautiful and promising. Keep up good work!

There's a large search bar prominently positioned in the top navigation bar. You won't see the search bar if you're logged in as a seller because that space at the top is used for account related functions. Simply log out or use a private browser window to see it. :)
 
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Alter is live on Product Hunt! Come check us out and spread the love. :)

If you're not familiar with Product Hunt, it's a curation of the best new products, every day. This is where a ton of entrepreneurs and product makers looking to build new startups hang out.
 
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Alter is live on Product Hunt! Come check us out and spread the love.
Its never a good move to try to stand out by attacking your competition. The best you can achieve with that is tarnish the industry as a whole and consequently yourself as a part of it.

Deven Patel said:
Most are already taken and existing domain owners want outrageous prices in return.
Outrageous? Really?

Surprise! The person below has an opinion about you:
Daniel James said:
It looks to be a good site but the prices on these brands are outrageously high.
 
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Its never a good move to try to stand out by attacking your competition. The best you can achieve with that is tarnish the industry as a whole and consequently yourself as a part of it.

I completely agree. You couldn't have said it any better. :)

Outrageous? Really?

Surprise! The person below has an opinion about you:

Yes, and that's not a surprise at all actually. Most buyers already think that and this person's comment further validates it. In order to convince them otherwise, we first have to show them that we understand where they're coming from. As you can see in my reply to that person on PH, I go on to explain the real value of good names.

When it comes to marketing, you have to understand and speak to your audience. It seems like you may be looking at it from the seller's perspective and I apologize if you were offended by it. Unfortunately, we have to balance the expectations of both buyers and sellers. That's no easy feat!
 
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I submitted 25 domains 2 days ago, and today 23 got rejected. It was a bit weird, as there were a couple of very nice names as well, but that's okay. Then I submitted 2 domains and both of them got rejected in 2 and 5 minutes. That's more than weird. I guess the people who are checking the submitted domains worked pretty fast today. Or maybe there's some issue at Alter and all domains get rejected automatically?


Same thing...I had 9 names...all got rejected within an hour at Alter.

I then submitted them to Squadhelp. 1 Got approved at Squadhelp premium listings after a day.
 
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My first sale on Alter. All went smoothly, nice experience!
Thanks Alter!

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