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.

 

[NameWell]

No offense but this is exactly the kind of fan boy reply I expected at some point to be honest. You wrote a lot but you haven't said much. Looks like people with many domains listed have no interest of discussing the SH problems and tend to hide them under the rug (perhaps) because they're afraid SH will turn off the sales tap?

My main issue is none of the ones you talked about, my main issue is they take the Afternic sales and add them to the STR making the STR data irrelevant for most people (including yourself). Those sales happening at Afternic have nothing to do with the SH platform and shouldn't be added to your STR regardless of all and any partnerships they might have with other marketplaces. You simply cannot claim you worked hard and made a sale for one of your members as long as the domain actually sold somewhere else and you had absolutely nothing to do with the sale itself (no listing, no promotion, no support, no escrow, nothing at all) but all you do is begging for some 10% commission.

Then list all of your brandable domain names on Brand Bucket and you will not have this issue as they simply do not allow sellers to list same domain names on BrandBucket AND Afternic. Problem solved. Oh wait, but they have SEDO integration and I'm pretty sure they include those sales in their stats too Otherwise, why bother with integration if you can't have significant benefits from it (commission from sales that otherwise wouldn't have happened and higher overall STR rate)?

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

No offense but this is exactly the kind of fan boy reply I expected at some point to be honest. You wrote a lot but you haven't said much. Looks like people with many domains listed have no interest of discussing the SH problems and tend to hide them under the rug (perhaps) because they're afraid SH will turn off the sales tap?

My main issue is none of the ones you talked about, my main issue is they take the Afternic sales and add them to the STR making the STR data irrelevant for most people (including yourself). Those sales happening at Afternic have nothing to do with the SH platform and shouldn't be added to your STR regardless of all and any partnerships they might have with other marketplaces. You simply cannot claim you worked hard and made a sale for one of your members as long as the domain actually sold somewhere else and you had absolutely nothing to do with the sale itself (no listing, no promotion, no support, no escrow, nothing at all) but all you do is begging for some 10% commission.

I agree with you on the STR part. They should remove it if that is what they are doing.

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

Then list all of your brandable domain names on Brand Bucket and you will not have this issue as they simply do not allow sellers to list same domain names on BrandBucket AND Afternic. Problem solved. Oh wait, but they have SEDO integration and I'm pretty sure they include those sales in their stats too Otherwise, why bother with integration if you can't have significant benefits from it (commission from sales that otherwise wouldn't have happened and higher overall STR rate)?

I believe what he is saying is that they shouldnt add to the STR but not about getting the benefits. The market places should correctly reflect the STR and stats and adding the names that sold through other means and platforms is not a correct way to present the STR.

 

[NameWell]

I believe what he is saying is that they shouldnt add to the STR but not about getting the benefits. The market places should correctly reflect the STR and stats and adding the names that sold through other means and platforms is not a correct way to present the STR.

I understand what he's saying, I just simply disagree with it He has a point, but I just don't think it's THAT important since if SH would not allow sellers to list same domain names on SH AND Afernic those sales that happened on Afternic probably wouldn't have happened at all.

On the same note, then why are we not demanding marketplaces to exclude all direct type-in traffic sales from their STR, because hey, they didn't move a finger! The buyer came up with the name themselves, typed it in their browser and bought it. That's it. The seller could have had a trustworthy looking landing page created by themselves and have the same result. Also, why are we not demanding them to exclude all sales that came when a buyer clicked on a link a seller shared on their social media, forum or elsewhere?

 

[Ntmt]

My main issue is none of the ones you talked about, my main issue is they take the Afternic sales and add them to the STR making the STR data irrelevant for most people (including yourself). Those sales happening at Afternic have nothing to do with the SH platform and shouldn't be added to your STR regardless of all and any partnerships they might have with other marketplaces. You simply cannot claim you worked hard and made a sale for one of your members as long as the domain actually sold somewhere else and you had absolutely nothing to do with the sale itself (no listing, no promotion, no support, no escrow, nothing at all) but all you do is begging for some 10% commission.

I do not agree. I will explain my personal point. When SH reviews my domains and accepts it, I treat it as a confirmation of that domains worth to invest in renewing (or registering in case of unregistered ones) and listing at Afternic. With this confirmation I feel more confident about my names and this is where SH adds value for me. Let's imagine I had no that confirmation - I may drop a domain and it may not be sold at Afternic.
I know that SH rejected domains may be great and may be sold elsewhere, but SH accepted kind of add more confidence for me that I'm not holding a heap of junk. This is where I see SH input in Afternic sale.
Of course in case someone has another source of confidence in their names - my point will not work for them.

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

I do not agree. I will explain my personal point. When SH reviews my domains and accepts it, I treat it as a confirmation of that domains worth to invest in renewing (or registering in case of unregistered ones) and listing at Afternic. With this confirmation I feel more confident about my names and this is where SH adds value for me. Let's imagine I had no that confirmation - I may drop a domain and it may not be sold at Afternic.
I know that SH rejected domains may be great and may be sold elsewhere, but SH accepted kind of add more confidence for me that I'm not holding a heap of junk. This is where I see SH input in Afternic sale.
Of course in case someone has another source of confidence in their names - my point will not work for them.

Change your approach , I would suggest. Dont value a domain simply because a marketplace told you it can list. I have sold many names that these places rejected and I kept and renewed them. The last two ones? Already this month.

 

[boker]

I understand what he's saying, I just simply disagree with it He has a point, but I just don't think it's THAT important since if SH would not allow sellers to list same domain names on SH AND Afernic those sales that happened on Afternic probably wouldn't have happened at all.

On the same note, then why are we not demanding marketplaces to exclude all direct type-in traffic sales from their STR, because hey, they didn't move a finger! The buyer came up with the name themselves, typed it in their browser and bought it. That's it. The seller could have had a trustworthy looking landing page created by themselves and have the same result. Also, why are we not demanding them to exclude all sales that came when a buyer clicked on a link a seller shared on their social media, forum or elsewhere?

Probably because you have started your domaining journey just couple of years ago, you have missed the period from a few years ago when namerific started and they where the same as SH today. They allowed anybody to list their domains everywhere, including afternic and sedo. They didn't made too many sales, but afternic and sedo were booming those days. So, how it would have been to not make any sales, but report hundreds of sales made through afternic and sedo and which were listed on their site as well and to count the STR including them? You are comparing them to BB and because of this, it seems like they are doing you a favour, by letting you list them on afternic, but the reality is that they don't have anything to do with afternic.

 

[Ntmt]

Change your approach , I would suggest. Dont value a domain simply because a marketplace told you it can list. I have sold many names that these places rejected and I kept and renewed them. The last two ones? Already this month.

You better tell how to value domain properly.
I also have majority of sales outside of SH, but additional source of valuation in a shape of acceptance/rejection will not hurt.

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

You better tell how to value domain properly.
I also have majority of sales outside of SH, but additional source of valuation in a shape of acceptance/rejection will not hurt.

It will hurt you because you are basing your business on that.

 

[GrantP]

I would like to chime in and address some of the recent discussion.

The STR metric simply provides an indication of what % of your SH listed domains have sold. To put things in perspective, about 93.5% of these sales happen on SH platform, and 6.5% happen on platforms outside SH.

Keep in mind that SH is an exclusive Marketplace, and in return for that exclusivity we make significant investment in Advertising as well as offer certain options to list domains outside SH. While it is likely that several of those 6.5% external sales had nothing to do with SH advertising, it is also not correct to assume that none of those sales were influenced by SH. In fact, we have heard from at least a few buyers that they decided to purchase a domain from a registrar after discovering the domain at SH first because they already had some names at that registrar and they felt more comfortable with that method.

As a platform, we share a significant amount of data and metrics (including almost our entire sales database). The point of providing this data is not to mislead the sellers, but to offer helpful and actionable information that can allow the sellers to make more informed decisions. On that note, we continue to hear from few sellers that the metrics related to visits, shortlists, STR etc may be "misleading" or "fake". While we will continue to share data and metrics as much as possible, we will re-assess the level of information shared, especially at a broader platform level. We will be making few changes to the dashboard in the upcoming days. We will also be adding "sales venue" information so that sellers can easily see which one of the reported sales actually occurred outside SH platform.

 

[NameWell]

Probably because you have started your domaining journey just couple of years ago, you have missed the period from a few years ago when namerific started and they where the same as SH today. They allowed anybody to list their domains everywhere, including afternic and sedo. They didn't made too many sales, but afternic and sedo were booming those days. So, how it would have been to not make any sales, but report hundreds of sales made through afternic and sedo and which were listed on their site as well and to count the STR including them? You are comparing them to BB and because of this, it seems like they are doing you a favour, by letting you list them on afternic, but the reality is that they don't have anything to do with afternic.

I see your point. Okay, Namerific did not include those sales in their STR. I'm guessing, Namerific also did not take commission from sales that happened on their partner's platforms, right? So where is Namerific now? If their business model is so great, why are they doing significantly worse than SH, BB or even BP?

 

[DomainBanana]

We will re-assess the level of information shared, especially at a broader platform level.

Grant, please don't let a few complaints destroy the metrics for everyone.

Many of us greatly appreciate these metrics (total views, total shortlists, etc.) and use them to help monitor the performance of our domains.

As I recently shared, monitoring the one-day % change in total views has been a reliable indicator for me to predict if I'll get an offer or sale:

Instead of limiting this data, I'd hope we could see more of it. In particular, a column for one-day % change in views for each domain, and a place on the dashboard showing domains with highest one-day % increase in views.

 

[boker]

I see your point. Okay, Namerific did not include those sales in their STR. I'm guessing, Namerific also did not take commission from sales that happened on their partner's platforms, right? So where is Namerific now? Are they rapidly growing? Do they have enough money to invest in marketing/remarketing to attract a lot of potential buyers to their marketplace? Why their traffic is so much lower than SH? Why their Alexa ranking is significantly worse than SH? Why I don't see any request for Namerific approved domain names in the Requests section of this forum? Why they are not often mentioned in "Report closed sales" thread here on NP? If their business model is so great, why are they doing significantly worse than SH, BB or even BP?

You don't get my point. I'm not saying that namerific is good, I'm saying how fair would have been for them to report hundreds of sales, when they were making 1% f them? Also, how fair would have been for them to report 4-6% STR based on sedo and afternic sales, when the real STR would have been under 1%? It's an extreme comparison, SH is in a different position today, but I'm using the comparison to make a point-selling a domain on afternic/sedo, doesn't add anything to SH performance and it should properly point that out.

 

[NameWell]

You don't get my point. I'm not saying that namerific is good, I'm saying how fair would have been for them to report hundreds of sales, when they were making 1% f them? Also, how fair would have been for them to report 4-6% STR based on sedo and afternic sales, when the real STR would have been under 1%? It's an extreme comparison, SH is in a different position today, but I'm using the comparison to make a point-selling a domain on afternic/sedo, doesn't add anything to SH performance and it should properly point that out.

You are comparing two completely different things. Of course, it would be not be fair / transparent / professional for Namerific to report hundreds of sales, when they were making 1% of them. But Grant just clarified that about 93.5% of these sales happen on SH platform, and only 6.5% happen on platforms outside SH. I don't see what's the big fuss about those 6.5% that happened because SH made a partnership with Afternic and SEDO. It's a small portion. It's not making dramatic impact.

And enough about this. Let's agree to disagree

 

[boker]

You are comparing two completely different things. Of course, it would be not be fair / transparent / professional for Namerific to report hundreds of sales, when they were making 1% of them. But Grant just clarified that about 93.5% of these sales happen on SH platform, and only 6.5% happen on platforms outside SH. I don't see what's the big fuss about those 6.5% that happened because SH made a partnership with Afternic and SEDO. It's a small portion. It's not making dramatic impact.

And enough about this. Let's agree to disagree

The big fuss is in situations like the one explained here, when the guy never sold anything through SH, but he has a STR of 13-14%, because of afternic sales. It is not misleading? So the 6.5% of sales, in the big picture could mean lot's of sales and misleading information. The easiest way will be to report only what sells on SH and use a STR like 99% of the other players from this industry, so that we can compare make a fair comparison.

 

[karmaco]

Lets not get it twisted. SH is “privileged” to have so many willing to sell low and share the profit with them. With 66 K plus “premium” names plus the WLM option thousands more your names chances of selling are no different than any other bloated market. The only way that SH manages to stand out to customers is cheap contests and very low pricing.

Domains have been selling for 20 plus years before SH, BB, etc existence. New options crop up often. I want to hear about sell through rates (which at the rate its going) will be next year SH doubles its current inventory. The honeymoon period is ending.

 

[NameWell]

Lets not get it twisted. SH is “privileged” to have so many willing to sell low and share the profit with them. With 66 K plus “premium” names plus the WLM option thousands more your names chances of selling are no different than any other bloated market. The only way that SH manages to stand out to customers is cheap contests and very low pricing.

Domains have been selling for 20 plus years before SH, BB, etc existence. New options crop up often. I want to hear about sell through rates (which at the rate its going) will be next year SH doubles its current inventory. The honeymoon period is ending.

The continuous rapid growth of SH inventory and it's expected negative effect on future sales is scaring me too. Currently, there are quite a lot of domain names owned by SH. It was mentioned in their forum that if domain names owned by SH will not sell in three years, they might be dropping them or liquidating them. If that happens, maybe that will help to keep the inventory and a sane rate. Also, some sellers with large portfolios might move away from SH if their STR drops. Or maybe SH will develop a smart AI algorithm that will be effective in helping buyers find what they need = resulting in less buyers leaving SH empty-handed. We'll see.

Also, I wish they would consider automatically delisting 5% of worst performing names on a regular basis (yes, even if that ment that some of my domain names were delisted). But that is unlikely to happen

 

[Ostrados]

Well, I see it in a completely different way. Before you had to choose if you want to list your domain names at Squadhelp OR at Afternic & SEDO. If you choose to list at SH, you might lose a sale on AN & SEDO and vice versa. Then SH moved a finger and made partnerships with AN and SEDO. While SEDO integration is automatic they went an extra mile and showed a lot of trust to sellers to let them list domain names individually on Afternic, report sales and pay the difference in commission.

You're paying those 10% for the privilege (yes, privilege) to make your domain name visible to all three audiences of Afternic/SEDO AND Squadhelp. You have a lot better exposure and bigger chances of selling your domain name. They eliminated the risk of losing a sale on AN/SEDO if you choose to list solely on SH. They deserve those 10% because they made partnerships and enabled you to have significantly bigger exposure. And they deserve to show those sales in their stats because they moved a finger in order for them to happen.

Vast majority of my sales happened through SH. Three happened via their partnership with Afternic. If they wouldn't have made that partnership it's very likely those three sales wouldn't have happened. So I'm grateful they happened and I got to benefit from that

SH invests a lot in attracting buyers to their marketplace and someone in this thread said, that they are selling 4,5 domain names on average per day. But if you think exposure on SH is completely worthless and most of your sales will happen elsewhere, you can always unlist all of your domain names from SH and list them on Afternic/SEDO and all other marketplaces that don't request exclusivity.

They can take the 10% commission no problem, but they can't claim it is their sale and calculate it in STR. Look at it from different angle, if I don't use SH at all then these Afternic sales will still happen, SH have no relation or connection with Afternic sales at all, SH just allowed me to list my domains at Afternic in return for paying 10% commission and additional coins for partial exclusivity. So SH took what they rightly deserve (fees) why they want to take what they don't (STR)?

 

[DomainBanana]

SH took what they rightly deserve (fees) why they want to take what they don't (STR)?

Grant already answered this: some buyers do see the name for sale on SH, they see the retargeted marketing, then they buy the domain on afternic/sedo/flippa.

Grant also told you the source of these sales will be clearly identified soon.

Counting this in the SH STR is fine by me.

What's missing in this conversation is the gratitude to SH for allowing all of these secondary marketplace integrations to help us maximize our sales.

 

[Ostrados]

I would like to chime in and address some of the recent discussion.

The STR metric simply provides an indication of what % of your SH listed domains have sold. To put things in perspective, about 93.5% of these sales happen on SH platform, and 6.5% happen on platforms outside SH.

Keep in mind that SH is an exclusive Marketplace, and in return for that exclusivity we make significant investment in Advertising as well as offer certain options to list domains outside SH. While it is likely that several of those 6.5% external sales had nothing to do with SH advertising, it is also not correct to assume that none of those sales were influenced by SH. In fact, we have heard from at least a few buyers that they decided to purchase a domain from a registrar after discovering the domain at SH first because they already had some names at that registrar and they felt more comfortable with that method.

As a platform, we share a significant amount of data and metrics (including almost our entire sales database). The point of providing this data is not to mislead the sellers, but to offer helpful and actionable information that can allow the sellers to make more informed decisions. On that note, we continue to hear from few sellers that the metrics related to visits, shortlists, STR etc may be "misleading" or "fake". While we will continue to share data and metrics as much as possible, we will re-assess the level of information shared, especially at a broader platform level. We will be making few changes to the dashboard in the upcoming days. We will also be adding "sales venue" information so that sellers can easily see which one of the reported sales actually occurred outside SH platform.

Why limit the data? just fix the data.

I don't see the point of hiding the metrics because they are not accurate.. this is like covering your old wall in you living room instead of paining it.

I am with removing external sales from metrics, it can be easily done and updated. Or you can just make the external sales metrics separate. Both ways are perfectly fine.

 

[Ostrados]

Counting this in the SH STR is fine by me.

But it is still wrong data

 

[DomainBanana]

But it is still wrong data

I disagree.

When you list a premium name with SH, you agree to allow SH represent the name.

They represent the name in several ways: on the premium marketplace, through marketing and advertising, and through partner platforms.

If a premium name sells on a partner platform, it is still a SH sale in my view, because of all the efforts SH has invested in representing the name.

 

[Ostrados]

The continuous rapid growth of SH inventory and it's expected negative effect on future sales is scaring me too. Currently, there are quite a lot of domain names owned by SH. It was mentioned in their forum that if domain names owned by SH will not sell in three years, they might be dropping them or liquidating them. If that happens, maybe that will help to keep the inventory and a sane rate. Also, some sellers with large portfolios might move away from SH if their STR drops. Or maybe SH will develop a smart AI algorithm that will be effective in helping buyers find what they need = resulting in less buyers leaving SH empty-handed. We'll see.

Also, I wish they would consider automatically delisting 5% of worst performing names on a regular basis (yes, even if that ment that some of my domain names were delisted). But that is unlikely to happen

I wish that SH will start curating their marketplace more and start trimming bad domains because that will help a lot in reducing the insane competition from oversaturation. For SH owned domains it is easy they can just start dropping them, the problem is with creatives owned domains, SH cannot just come and remove accepted names, the only way is to make sellers remove these "bad" domains optionally maybe in exchange of coins or some other benefits.

 

[Ostrados]

I disagree.

When you list a premium name with SH, you agree to allow SH represent the name.

They represent the name in several ways: on the premium marketplace, through marketing and advertising, and through partner platforms.

If a premium name sells on a partner platform, it is still a SH sale in my view, because of all the efforts SH has invested in representing the name.

The reward for that is commission % and coins.

STR = number of sales in a market / total number of domains in that market

Examples:
Afternic STR = Sales at Afternic / Total Domains at Afternic
Sedo STR = Sales at Sedo / Total Domains at Sedo

So the following is mathematically wrong like it or not:
SH STR = Sales at SH + Sales at Afternic / Total Domains at SH

 

[DomainBanana]

So the following is mathematically wrong like it or not:
SH STR = Sales at SH + Sales at Afternic / Total Domains at SH

What you're ignoring is the possibility that buyers see these domains on SH, or see them in SH advertising, and buy on another platform.

Again, when you list a premium name on SH, you're basically nominating SH as the managing broker for the domain and trusting SH to sell the domain however they can.

Partner integrations are one tactic among many that SH uses to sell domains. If a domain sells through an authorized partner, SH has accomplished its mission and it should count as a SH sale.

Other marketplaces that don't offer these partner integrations might see a lower STR and that would be correct -- SH deserves credit for giving sellers maximum opportunity to sell by using partner integrations.