Atom / Atom.com - Marketplace (formerly Squadhelp)

[JudgeMind]

Hey Folks,

I've just started using squadhelp.com to list some of my brandable. So far I have 76 domains listed, there is no fee to list. I've had some decent action so far in the way of interested buyers but no sales as of yet. I've only been with them for 1 week now.

A bit of a summary review of SquadHelp:

PROS

• No Listing fee
• No Logo design fee
• Ability to submit your names to end users holding naming contests
• Ability to chat directly or send a message directly to end users.
• Stats of your marketplace domains are shown in the marketplace dashboard.
• Their customer service and support has been great, 24hr a day chat.
• Ability to increase or decrease the list price of your domains or to show a discount. You can decrease or increase the price yourself by $200. If you want to lower more, you can contact support.
• End users can shortlist your domains before they make a decision on which they want to purchase. The number of shortlists is shown in you marketplace dashboard.
• When you submit your names you get to set the price you wish to get. Because their commissions are high I recommend listing at a higher price to offset the commission costs.
• Their landing pages are fairly basic but they work. Because the marketplace is fairly new, I'm sure we will see style improvements in the future.
• One thing I really like is they accept multiple extensions. I have listed .co and .io along with .com
• Each seller gets a direct link to their marketplace portfolio, HERES MY PORTFOLIO. It is handy if your trying to p[promote your portfolio through social media.
• I like that their marketplace doesn't have tens of thousands domain listings like BB. They are fairly strict on the domains they accept to list and so this helps keep the number of domains in the marketplace down and gets your listings more exposure.

CONS

• Their commissions are very high, depending on the domain name they are usually between 30% and 35%. However, there are no listing fees, no logo design fees, so in the end their commission is very similar to brand buckets.
• Their logos are not top quality, in fact I requested to have some of my logos remade.
• I think they have a big backlog of logos to design, the wait time for logo design has been around 1 week, but your names are still listed while the logos are being designed.
• After your names are accepted you need to agree to their commission rate, at this point you also need to apply your own keywords, descriptions etc. I found this was very time consuming.

 

[JudgeMind]

January was a solid month at squadhelp managed to sell

Overleap.com via sh marketplace

Nik.co - I did outbound for this name and brought the buyer into sh. They wanted to use Dan.com but I honoured the sh agreement.

trubello.com - via sh marketplace

In February sh has been slow but I’ve sold a few sh names via afternic including

inlay.io
BloomBiotics.com

I will be monitoring the number of sh listed names sold at afternic vs sold in the sh marketplace over the next months.

No sh marketplace sales to report in February yet. Will share more as sales occur. Cheers

 

[TBN]

Things still not going well for me on Squadhelp. 0.67% sell through with nearly 700 names now. Not had a single sale since 2021.

I have previously been in touch with Squadhelp on it, to see if they had any advice on anything that could be improved or the reason for no sales. I was advised to ensure the portfolio was optimised, and a few other suggestions. But sadly, still no sales in all this time. It is costing me a lot of money, of course, without any sales. Not sure how much longer to continue like this in terms of hanging on to see if sales increase.

Interested to know how things are for others, so it is also helpful to keep checking this thread to give me an idea on that. Thanks.

 

[GrantP]

Thank you all for your feedback. We are indeed receiving a significantly high number of submissions (more than 1000 per day). Despite this high number of submissions, our acceptance rate continues to be about 7 to 8% (we are only approving about 70-80 names per day).

We are in the process of ramping up our team further so that we can continue to review the submissions in a timely fashion. We will also be adding additional restrictions on how many names can be submitted by individuals at the same time. At this point we do not plan to charge any fees for sellers to submit names, but we will certainly add more limits based upon your current approval rate.

Here are our typical timelines:

* Review of names (from when they are submitted): 3-5 business days (our goal is to review most names within 1-2 business days).

* Go live (after approval): 1-2 business days (names typically go live on the following business day of approval).

* Logo Design after approval: 2-4 Weeks. We recognize that this is a long time, and we are working on ramping up the team to cut this time further.

We are excited about the growth of the marketplace, however we also recognize that extended timelines for reviews and logos can be extremely frustrating. We are investing in the right resources and additional platform features so that we can continue to offer a best in class experience for everyone.

 

[JudgeMind]

Small update on my SH experience.

Sales seem to be coming in after longer time frames, I currently have 291 premium domain listings in the SH marketplace and over saturation of the market has drastically decreased the visibility of my listings. Average sales time in the past six months "for me" has increased from 2 weeks to 6 weeks.

I find it very difficult to understand how a 10%-20% STR is possible over 12 months... regrettably, I scaled in a big way with SH after seeing some real results early on, but now I may need to begin removing names from there and sell <$500 on afternic or sedo. Be great to hear how things are going for others here, but I'm quite disappointed in sales results.

 

[Andore]

Hello everyone.

I've been lurking these forums for some time, but only now decided to create an account to report something... I finally had my first domain sold!

Right. First of all, I'm not a domainer.

I have been trying to find a way to make money on the internet for a while and basically accumulating failures. Survey platforms were definitely the most frustrating, since I wasted hours not to earn a single penny.

If I'm not mistaken, I found out about Squadhelp through YouTube and it just seemed too good to be true. (Looking back, it kinda was, but mostly because the people promoting it would leave some important details aside...)

Still, I tried to participate in some contests without success, until I discovered the possibility of submitting names to the marketplace, without any cost.

The thing is, I had no idea about all this "domaining" stuff. (In fact, I still know very little.)

This thread was one of the first results I found about this feature in Squadhelp and I really liked the information, mostly because it seemed unbiased enough.

So I tried to learn a thing or two here, while submitting a few names.

The problem is that the whole process seemed to be like "shooting in the dark". I understand why they don't tell the reason behind rejections, since it would take time and time is a valuable resource. But I still dislike the feeling of not having idea if I'm improving or becoming worse.

Not only that, but the anxiety caused by the wait followed by seeing the approval rate drop and points being deducted... I don't wish this feeling to anyone.

So I kind of left my portfolio with only 3 domains. Sometimes I would remember and check, but without much expectations.

Then 26 weeks later, I get an email saying that one of my domains has been sold:

Optello / com (SH registered)
$1899 ($474 was my comission)

I still couldn't believe. Maybe I was missing something, maybe the buyer could still cancel it or whatever. In 4-5 days another email saying that the transfer had been completed.

Again, I was like "right, the next step probably is going to take more than 2 weeks"... It took about 6 hours. What followed was a Joker-like laugh...

Now I'm not sure about how to proceed. I still feel my anxiety skyrocketing when participating on contests or trying to submit something to the marketplace. It just doesn't seem to get easier.

If anything I'm staying in Squadhelp, because I don't feel I have experience or money to invest anywhere else. I have no idea about their criteria... but now I have proof it just works.

And that's it, just a heads up for any hopeless lurker passing by, as I was. I thank everyone for the information shared here.

 

[brandsly]

I don't usually like to get into these marketplace experience thread discussions, but really want to chip in a few things here after reading these comments.

It was obvious that the previous in-house review team were not all (if any) domainers themselves, they rejected names like o c k u.com (twice, even after review), l u x a s h o p which was later approved by BB for $7500, i z u k u . c o m, later approved by BB for $10k, some other examples c l e v e r p l e x . c o m, o l o z o. c o m, B o n u s f u l .com, B u z z L a y e r . c o m etc.....To be fair, I only submitted them because I don't love them myself, they are not the best in my portfolio, but think most brandable domainers can see instant value in these names. I sell similar names on the daily on Afternic and Dan for 4 figures.

When they decided to do this whole expert review thing, I was actually excited initially that they finally have real domainers reviewing names, but I don't think that is the case.

Some of them definitely are, I know some of the top sellers are long time brandable domainers. But the problem is SH started with a different business model, it started with contests where contestants mostly come up with handreggable names with no real liquid value of any kind, so anyone with a knack for coming up with good-sounding names joined and made money, but a lot of them never actually invested in domains and do not understand domain value. You can tell from a lot of their published and sold names on the site, some of these names would never ever be able to sell even for reg fee in auctions, let alone to end users without any marketplace exposure.

I mostly submitted my lower end names and made-up names I had for a while, then I learned about the lower commission for higher priced names, so I submitted one of my least favorite dictionary word s e t t l i n g .com, and guess what....it barely got a little over 50% vote through the expert review system, a name I fought hard in auction for and paid over $3k for!!! It was eventually reviewed in-house and got approved for $20K but still left a bad taste in my mouth. A bunch of aged names and good 5L names were also rejected, it's almost apparent that the upvotes were by real domainers and downvotes were by these so called "branders" that were not domain investors, and became branders only because of SH, and have no clue about domain value beyond the words they know. I've never been so proud of being able to call myself and the friends on NP "domainers".

This experience really made me thankful for deciding to not rely on these marketplaces to sell names and went out on my own from the start and learned to stand on my own feet and made mid-six figure sales every year. When I first started, I got a bunch of names rejected by Brandbucket too, doubted my names, dropped a bunch which later got picked up and got sold by other people, the ones I kept I made many many mid 4 figure sales. Now that I'm more experienced, I don't let these marketplace valuations get to me and doubt my names anymore, but it's still frustrating at times. They really only deserve your lowest quality and handregged names.

I still managed to get over 30% approval rate, but the voting system is very flawed. "Experts" pick their favorite out of 4 names in every poll, but what if all 4 names belong to the same person and they are all good names?! Also basically it depends on your luck, if everyone else's names suck on the day you submit, you get more approvals, if someone submit a bunch of super premium names at once, you are screwed. If there's no names queued up, and I submit a thousand names at once, even if they are all good names, they still will not all get approved because only the ones relatively better than other ones will get approved. Or am I missing something here? @GrantP

 

[JudgeMind]

Squadhelp Review update October 2020 Brandaim.com

Hey folks, October was much better for us then September. In September brandaim had "0" sales to report for squadhelp premium.

Here are our sales from October:

Premium Sales

Nordiqo.com - $1599 - 12 month instalment plan
Vista9.com - $1399 - full bin purchase
Vaaxa.com - $1649 - 6 month instalment plan

SH WLM Sales

HealingEveryNation (com) - $2500

I was having some issue in October with setting things up in my WLM using google sheets and during that time had switched things back to dan.com. Now everything again is pointing to my brandaim wlm. Currently i have not enabled the make offer feature and am offering buy it now only with instalment plan option.

As you can see, the sale prices for October were all <$2000. After not having any sales in September, i reduced most of my pricing that was just over $2000 to just under $2000 and enabled the discounts on auto pilot option.

CURRENT STATS

I am still not sure why my shortlists/views % is so low. The only thing i can attribute it to is the overwhelming competition in the marketplace and over saturation.

I am still waiting for a big ($) sale at squadhelp, to date my highest price sale has been $4499.

Happy Halloween, good luck to all in November with your sales.

 

[NameWell]

I rejoined Squadhelp about 1.5 months ago after testing another marketplace for 4 months. After switching dns to sh I landed an early on sale, likely as that buyer was monitoring the domain and jumped to buy when they saw the change.. it’s now been 6 weeks and there’s been no sales, no offers, barely any submissions to contests by creatives… is anyone else with a similar premium portfolio size (850) been getting any action over the past few weeks?

Hi @JudgeMind glad to see you back in this thread! I used to really enjoy your monthly reviews and I missed them when you left. So like I said, glad to have you back

My current portfolio size is 552 premium domain names. I've been on SH since the very beginning of the marketplace and it feels like now it's in its lowest place somehow. I haven't had any sales for the last several months and no offers. Nothing. I'm deciding what to do next.

Also, several weeks ago I had an issue where my domain name did not come up in the search results even when that exact name was typed in. Squadhelp recognized the issue, solved it and gave me one free super boost, but I'm wondering how many of my other domain names have had the same issue or maybe are having it right now?

 

[NameWell]

What's going on with the newly registered names by SH? For several weeks in a row, I keep seeing this tendency in the wholesale marketplace. Almost on a daily basis, new weird names that are registered by SH are added to the wholesale marketplace at very low prices on the same day of registration or very soon after it. You can see those names by filtering "registered by SH" and "Sort by: price low to high". These names are usually made up of two random keywords that don't make any sense together i.e. MergeChair.com (just an example, not an actual name). How come SH is registering such names? I understand that some names might occasionally slip through their filter and they used to slip in the past too, but now it looks like this is out of control.

 

[NameWell]

Things are looking sad on SH. No sales in October and no sales so far in November. Within the last 7 and a half months, I had only two sales and that is NOT a great result. Last year I would usually sell 1-3 domains per month, and now ...
My portfolio size - 567 premium names.

How are your sales?

 

[JudgeMind]

Happy new year everyone. This year i will try to make more of an effort to get back to sharing my monthly stats with you as i continue to grow my sh portfolio.

There are many sellers at sh now with portfolios > 1k names. As i try to add better quality names, my hope as i grow is to also maintain or increase my STR.

Here are my current account stats to start the year.

 

[lovely4ever]

Of course, you must point your nameservers to SH at all times, this proves that you indeed own the domain, it's in their TOS. Or else they would advertise non-existent domains like other incompetent marketplaces. This ensures that all domains are indeed for sale. Seems like you don't even want to sell this domain on SH, so what's the problem here? Or if you want to sell this domain on SH, then change the nameservers to the SH nameservers, simple.

Please before you to start answering and giving philosophy lectures , just go and read the issue from the beggining to understand what happened .

From the way you reply to people here seems you set your self as a lawyer of squadhelp and want to protect them by any way and to show that no issues and they are perfect !! and the sellers are only mistaken and guilty !!
I suspect you are a staff of squadhelp and hiding under normal nickname to keep replying and defending squadhelp !!

.

 

[JudgeMind]

Happy April everyone.

I hope you all had a great March. I would like to share how sales and portfolio building went for me in March.

I added only 7 new squadhelp names to my portfolio in March. Here are some of the new names that got added:

Sales in March were slower than February. I had only 1 sale in March for $2249.

NOTE: 2 monthly sales in this price range are needed to cover costs. Losing money at only 1 sale per month with this portfolio size.

Account wise, We have increased our total premium listings to 1,114. I think there are probably lots of sellers at squadhelp with over 1k premium listings now.

BEST OF LUCK TO ALL IN APRIL. THANKS.

 

[JudgeMind]

That Time to Sell metric... about a month ago the Site Avg sat at 110 weeks. Then 142 weeks, then 160 weeks. And apparently now it's at 175 weeks. Terrifying, and I wish I knew what is driving it.

it used to be around 10 weeks when i first started selling. The marketplace is now at 217,000+ premium listings and it is greatly affecting STR.

 

[Edukar]

Hi, friend, , you need to write to the blue button that you cannot and do not know how to add TXT entries to DNS. Since you were identified at SH, try to send them a screenshot from the registrar that the domain belongs to you, that is, a screenshot with your name and address. Maybe this will help.

 

[GrantP]

I would like to address some comments related to quality of names. As many would agree, the quality of brandable names is subjective. Since the onset of our Marketplace, we decided that we wanted to leverage something that was truly unique to our platform:

• Wealth of data in the form of direct end user feedback on more than 6 million names submitted to our Platform
• Thousands of one on one interactions with end users where our branding consultants have spent over 5000 hours of phone calls to understand the brand requirements of end users.

Since then, we have built some fairly comprehensive predictive analytics models that take into account more than 15 data-points about names. They not only analyze physical aspects of names (e.g. length, syllables, keywords used, name styles etc) but also take into account end user based signals (e.g. likes received in contests, winning history in contests, shortlists in marketplace etc).

Every name that is submitted to our Marketplace goes through these predictive models as a first step and is assigned an overall score to "predict" the likelihood of sale. In the end, the decision to accept or reject a name finally lies with a human however this score is one of the important factors considered by the person reviewing the names.

Just to be clear, no predictive algorithm can be right all the time - and this is especially the case with brandable names. However, we believe this algorithm significantly helps increase the odds that the name will resonate with our potential buyers.

The ultimate measure of success of any such algorithm is the sell through rate. Every month, we adjust this algorithm and our acceptance criteria based upon our additional learnings. Therefore, we may have accepted certain styles of names in the past, but it is possible that we may no longer accept them. Infact, we are now only accepting about 6% of names submitted to the Marketplace.

If you have watched the movie Moneyball, you might agree that using data and predictive analytics can sometimes bring a different perspective to the selection process. While a majority of our names in the marketplace will never sell, we do believe that our data driven approach will allow us to maintain the highest level of sell through rate in the industry.

 

[Cdomains]

For all the experts who have sold names on SH before, I have question. What is the average number of "views" and "shortlist" that your domain received before it was sold? Any insights on that front? Thanks in advance!

I have domains with lots of views and shortlists and they have not sold.

Domains I have sold have not been among the highest in views or shortlists.

I don't think it matters that much.

The dashboard in SH is just there to dazzle you

and make you feel good about keeping your domains with them.

Most of the info they show has no connection to actual sales in my experience.

 

[JudgeMind]

SH update June 20 - August 1

Its been a busy month as I have migrated all of my name servers to BrandAim.com my new Squadhelp white label marketplace.

In july I launched my WLM and had 3 sales.
I had one basic plus sale in July
I had 2 premium listing sales in July

I’ve also reached platinum status now at Squadhelp and have 504 premium listings live. I have another 90 or so basic plus listings and have 2500 additional names in my WLM

29 total sales to date

 

[decades80]

I also have no sales in July, August and Sept. and have 800 domains at Squadhelp. Anyone else with 500+ domains and no sales for almost 3 months?

 

[NameWell]

Any sales in December? None for me still. My annual sell-through is well under 1% now.

None sales in December, but I had one sale in November.

A weird thing though, this year I'm mostly selling SH-owned names (which means large commissions for them, small commissions for me) SH-owned names are taking the vast majority of spots among my top trending domain names. In 2021 and 2020 I had significantly better proportions between the sales of SH-owned domain names and domain names owned by me than this year. I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, I realize that this trend is most likely happening because of completely natural and organic reasons. I'm just stating the fact and keeping my attention on this trend. I'm curious about what the year 2023 will bring. I hope for a better proportion of the sales of SH-owned domain names and seller-owned domain names.

 

[L3af]

I've been on SH for 3 years with 100 premium domains and never sold a thing. I've sold names on Dan, Afternic and BB that were rejected by SH.

Am I the only one not having success?

 

[GoKaizen]

No sales.

Some inquiries but SH can't close them.

I stopped adding domains.

They need to improve STR.

As i approach 3 months without a sale at squadhelp, i question if everyone else is experiencing similar results.

Show attachment 245945

 

[TBN]

I think that our colleague asked about portfolio to know bad sales reason. If you have a good portfolio and no one buys your domains, this is an occasion to think. If the quality of the domains leaves much to be desired, then the rule of 1% sales of the total domain number does not work here. I state that domain sales have fallen all over the world. I have only 400 average quality hand regged domains, but I sold only 2 of them, this is 0.5%, that is, twice as worse than average indicators.

Yes, I understand and agree. I would hope, however, that SH approval process should have some relevance. If not a single name sells out of hundreds, year after year, I wonder at the point of the approval process. It is not an especially high value priced portfolio. Around average selling price. Some of the names have previously been accepted at other brandable marketplaces. Just take it as one single report of sales results, nothing more.

 

[freety85]

I just can´t figure it out the sweet spot price range there for these typical brandables to be honest (I have different styles listed ( from keyword based to made up). I do have some sales as Recons mentioned, mostly from AF lately, but simply for some reason SH cannot convert properly from a portfolio of circa 600. I started to doubt my names then I have done a little experiment to auto-confirm my naming selection. Of course the names were quickly picked up by large portfolio holders for decent prices at the internal wholesale marketplace. Names are hidden due to my buyer´s privacy , the vast majority of my names mostly listed at 2.6k-3.5k range retail.

It is just from the last few days, so I removed my names from wholesale to assess what is going on. I am successful at Afternic for the very same style of names ( mainly sub3k).
Note I really like squadhelp for their tech and innovation and I want to make this work. So I perhaps give a last change by further adjusting my prices (maybe 2.2k-2.5k would trigger some impulse buyers) Perhaps something will start to move since they added the Escrow checkout as well. I guess then I will have these options :
- ride it out and let´s see if things improve
- add a ton more names ( more chances to sell even at low STR)
- list on Afternic ( ns5.ns6 works for me) back it up with Sedo and remove all names and thank for the collaboration

@Recons.Com you mentioned earlier that these marketplaces can "hurt" your sales long term:
- is it because their listings are in the hundreds of thousands
- the Godaddy vs SH lander ( trust factor)
- is it due to the price markup you need to add to the Afternic listings and this very same fact creates confusion with buyers.

Bottom line is: regardless how much I like the platform for various reasons at the end of the day I need to make a business decision which improves the performance of my own portfolio.

 

[JudgeMind]

managed to sneak in a sh sale before month end. Still slowest month of the year for me on squadhelp. Sold Trevata.com for $2299. Thank you!