a check at SH sales suggests that temporary reducing price works. Any sale around 1499 or anything less than 1999 is a sale that happened after the price was reduced (as 1999 is the lowest they can list for).
And on the sales report thread here, so many persons have reported sales after just reducing the price. Twiki for example. In SH's case, the temporary reduction lasts for a week after which the price goes back to normal or if the seller wishes, restarts it.
If it doesn't work or have no impact on sales I doubt a company like SH will have such an option and even go ahead to have a menu where you can choose to allow them routinely offer temporary discount on your name.
I appreciate the insight! Though I feel like we still need more data. As the saying goes,
correlation does not imply causation. There are still a lot of unknown variables at play in this case (i.e. we don't know if SH markets lower-priced domains differently, how previously interested buyers are notified, how many buyers like/dislike this, etc).
In terms of why marketplaces implement features, there's a lot that goes into making those decisions beyond whether they actually result in more sales (i.e. some features are developed to make sellers happy in order to grow inventory at the cost of buyer experience). Things are never black and white as I'm sure you know.
A small feature request. When a buyer selects "Filter", preserve or prepopulate the current category or search term.
Example:
A buyer searches for a
moon domain name, and then decides to (further) filter the results. At that moment, the original 'moon' keyword is lost, because it's not prepopulated in the filter settings.
Thank you.
Thanks for the suggestion! Though this is already how it works today. Can you please reach out to support with your specific device/browser/OS information so we can troubleshoot better?
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!
Thank you for the in-depth review! Much appreciated.
Are you going to list the Alter names on DAN in the Open Domain Distribution Network?
We're always monitoring everyone's feedback. If a considerable number of sellers want this and the network reaches more eyeballs compared to today then sure.
I prefer to point the DNS of many of my names to a parking page (like bodis, for example) then use their "This domain may be for sale" area to link to the actual For Sale page. Will you allow us to do this with Alter? (Currently if the DNS is not pointing to Alter the name gets de-listed from Alter.)
I would love more flexibility on name servers too. I prefer to point the DNS of many of my names to my own WLM. I would appreciate it if I could prove my ownership by changing TXT records and have my domain names listed on Alter.com that way, without pointing name servers to Alter.
Long story short, we can't operate a marketplace at 10% commission alone unless we stopped doing any additional marketing. By requiring you to use our landing pages, we can offset some of our other marketing costs. The better question to ask is why some marketplaces require you to use their landers AND charge you 30-35% commission.
which is better BIN only or BIN + Make offer in Alter landers?
Do you have data backed analysis on this?
I think the best setup is BIN + installment payments, and no "make offer" button. The buyer can contact Alter and make an offer anyway. If you set BIN and installment payments only, then the buyer has to choose only from two options: buy the domain now and pay it in full, or buy the domain and pay it in installments. But then your BIN price should be realistic, it is also important.
I am not interested in installments option, I had bad experience with it and I only use BIN or Make Offer.
I don't have any conclusive data on this but I suspect it will be very hard to give you a decisive answer at any point because a lot of this depends on the domain/price/seller/buyer.
The only advice I can give you (if you're open to it) is try not to let your personal biases cloud your judgement (i.e. how you feel about installments).
There's no right or wrong answer but if I had to make an educated guess, it would be something like this based on the domain's appraisal:
- <$1k - BIN
- $1k-10k - BIN + Installments
- $10k-100k - BIN + Installments + Make Offer
- $100k-1000k - BIN + Make Offer
- >$1000k - Make Offer
Of course, this assumes that the appraisals are realistic as
@Charybdis said. And more importantly, every situation is different so take everything above with a grain of salt. For example, one big factor that contributes to this is how quickly the seller wants to sell the name (i.e. low price + all options would result in the quickest sale).
Just moved 800+ names to Alter.com .
That's great. Thanks for your support!
Two weeks ago I had a sale on Alter, first received a payment email and in a few hours transfer request, the domain was pushed to Alter account promptly and then that was it. Asked in a few days and Alter told me they are unable to contact the buyer. Likely the emails went to spam so there is very little chance it gets better, who knows how long is it gonna be before the buyer wakes up and decides to do something about their purchase... It was not a big sale, less than 2K, and we all know the stories of much more expensive domains which go to the expired auctions the next year after having been purchased, its not unusual when buyers forget about their freshly acquired domains and is likely what happened to my sale as well.
In the buy it now window it is stated "All payments will be final and non-refundable once the domain is in escrow.". I think it means Alter has it covered within their ToS legally, and since its like that, does it make sense not to pay the seller? The domain is in Alter possession so whenever the buyer is back to claim it Alter has been enabled to complete the transfer...
Today is one month since this sale, last week Alter emailed me and said I have two options, either they refund the buyer and I can relist the domain for sale or continue waiting, thus still waiting...
Alter should collect the phone numbers of both buyers and sellers, and in these cases they could send a text message or make a phone call. If email is the only contact option, and the emails go to spam or the email is not working, then without the phone number it is impossible to contact the buyer or the seller.
It can happen also in the case of a seller: a seller sells a domain, and then Alter cannot contact the seller via email, and there is no phone number.
Definitely! Also, I believe that Alter should have a very clear policy in place for such cases (the buyer makes the payment, the seller transfers the domain name to Alter, the buyer then disappears.) Preferrable option: if the buyer is not responsive for 10 days, the payment is then automatically sent to the seller and the buyer is not eligible for any refunds. Alternatively, it could be that the domain name is transferred back to the seller and put back on the marketplace until things are resolved with the buyer. If Alter ends up refunding the buyer, they should only make a partial refund and use the rest to compensate the seller for the off-market time.
Keeping the seller's domain name as a hostage at Alter's escrow for unlimited time and making the seller cover for all of the time that it was off-market is very unprofessional and not fair. The seller did all they could on their end. It's not their responsibility that Alter can't do their part.
Non-responsive buyers are generally dealt with on a case by case basis based on their payment method, sale amount, transfer method, and prior communication. For example, if they pay using a credit card/wire/crypto and there's a history of conversation with them that proves that they indeed want to purchase the domain then we would close the transaction and release the funds after a couple weeks. On the other hand, if they pay using PayPal and there's absolutely no prior conversation with them (indicative of fraud) then we would offer the seller an option to reverse the transaction or wait until the buyer responds (like in this case). Again, these are just a couple examples. It's ultimately all about how much risk each of these situations pose.
Regarding collecting phone numbers, like with everything else, there are always trade-offs (i.e. more friction for buyers). Though we've never had an issue with this because people who spend this kind of money always reach out to us proactively if they don't hear from us after making payment (i.e. if our emails went to spam).
I do understand the frustration around waiting for the sale to complete and the uncertainty around it but it's a cost of doing business. As a marketplace, we take certain losses too for the greater good. For example, just the other day we sold a domain for ~$17k and had to process a refund because the seller didn't immediately remove the duplicate listing from another marketplace. The buyer ended up paying there again despite us telling them not to (English wasn't their first language). So even though we didn't need to process the refund, we still did so that the seller can complete the sale quicker with a competitor despite us losing ~$700 in processing fees + $X in marketing/operating costs. All because we thought it was the right thing to do to make the seller happy. In other words, an unfortunate cost of doing business.
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/
I can confirm that this is the case for several domains I tested at Alter.
Good catch and thanks for troubleshooting! We were able to fix the problem quicker because of you guys.
The certificates should be automatically renewed but as you know, technology is never perfect and there's no way for humans to account for 100% of the scenarios so bugs are unavoidable.
Any new features, or planned new features of the Alter marketplace?
There are plenty of things on the roadmap with varying priorities but for the most part the focus is on generating sales. Unless a new feature has a direct impact on sales, it's probably not going to be implemented immediately as those resources can be better used on marketing.
That said, I value everyone's feedback here. It's much appreciated!
