BrandBucket Experience

[xtremex]

hello

I am new to BrandBucket. Before getting my hands on this

I wish to experience about brandbucket from my fellow members


Thanks

 

[TimCulpepper]

Just sold

B E N O R O [dot] C O M

Hand reg'd in feb 15 with a $1.49 Godaddy coupon

took 2 months to go live on BB; sold about 2 weeks later

I've seen a few haters on this thread who think BB is useless, that we'd be better off selling our names on our own; but there are some types of names that are just never going to sell unless they get seen in a marketplace.

whois tells me the name was purchased by a venture capital firm for one of its startups... probably bought it off the BB newsletter

I'm sorry folks, but this name would have taken forever to sell on my own

I am VERY happy to give BB its commission; they earn it

 

[Brandworthy]

Just to add: I have around 370 names listed, with 14 sales. I could look up the exact figures, but ball-park for now - my costs are around $40 per name, and I'd imagine I've netted around $1500 per sale. So my revenue is ~$21k with costs of around ~$15k.

Even if your cost of picking up names is $10, together with listing fee you're spending $20. Given an average sales rate of say 5% you'll need to list 20 names to get a single sale. If your acceptance rate is 50% then you're talking 40 names for a single sale. That's costing you $600, and the average sale is probably netting sellers around $1300 (($2k - 30%)-$100). Still a good ROI, but it's far better to consider your total costs rather than the cost of the single name you sell.

Add to the above the fact that 5% is probably on the high side based on evidence from many sellers here. There are a couple of users with 300+ names and 0, 1 or 2 sales. 300 names @$20 each is $6,000, or probably closer to $9k assuming the 50% acceptance rate is correct. Will take quite a few sales to even break even, and right now many of us are still trying to figure out a realistic sales rate.

Thankfully I'm selling quite a few domains outside BB, and being honest I'm very much in hold-mode trying to determine whether adding considerable more inventory to BB makes economic sense. I'm still positive on BB, but I think it's really important not to put all your domain eggs into one basket and to very carefully analyse your costs. Far too easy to focus on the big ROI sale and ignore all the flops that are required to get that one big sale.

[Edit: forgot to consider the acceptance rate on BB. Then corrected the cost of 40 names, and finally corrected the potential cost of holding a 300 name portfolio on BB. Re-learnt how to multiply.]

 

[Zoltan P.]

Well, after a looooong wait I can report on 2 sales. First name was on the market for over a year, second name sold on the same day (from first page I believe).

Super happy!

 

[Nazz]

Happy to report another BB sale. It is my second within the last couple of months or so..

11 names published/active while this one sold.

Low $x,xxx

Happy face.

 

[12345]

Here are my sales for July. BB had a great month including some nice 5-figure LLLL sales.

B U F F E R Z O N E
S T A C K P A T H
S A F E C L O A K
B O O K T I V A
Z E N P U L S E
H O L S T R
C A R S Y
T R A C K E R L Y
D A N C E F U L
U B E R S E C U R I T Y
H Y Y P E
S E R V E S U P

 

[AndrewRice]

Hello Everyone,
I was fortunate enough to get another sale recently: D*O*G*I*T*U*D*E

 

[Brandworthy]

Interesting that the wholesale market seems to be maturing nicely now.

Happy to have another sale today: * C * L * E * V * O * S *. Went live on BB 12 October.

 

[Chris Hydrick]

I just logged into my BrandBucket account to deal with some recent approvals, come to find one of my domains has disabled features, and the above ribbon attached to it. I haven't received an email yet. I'll post more details once the sale is finalized.

I think this is a very effective way of dealing with things, so if you see the Sold sign on your name wait until you receive the email. That's when you can celebrate.

Welp, I got the confirmation email this morning. Now, time for my happy dance...

It was a hand reg from November, and my first BB sale.

 

[sound]

Another sale this week have now sold 5 domains from a total of 13 listed

 

[Doron Vermaat]

None here. My portfolio is 312 domains and it's been 47 days since I had a sale.

I had a BB sale confirmed this week (still in escrow). It's the very first BB sale this year for me out of a portfolio of 111 names listed so the platform has been performing pretty poorly for me so far this year. Especially compared to 2015 when I had 9 sales with BB. Fwiw, I did stopped listing new names with BB and similar marketplaces such as BR in November.

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

I dont have a lot of names listed with BB but yesterday I had my first sale. It was published less than a week ago and I had some doubts about it selling quickly but then I asked @Keith DeBoer ( knows his stuff very very well ) which of the domains I had pending he thought is the best. He told me the domain that sold yesterday is the best of the bunch.

And booom it is sold.

Since some members talked about @Dnbolt missing some data , I will see if his website will report this sale before I share the domain

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

Sold B/r/a/n/d/e/l/i/t/y on BB yesteryday.

 

[Brandworthy]

As I said BB has worked for me. Before I joined BB I couldn't even sell a great name for $300. Now, I sell S**t names on BB for $3000.

It's good to see that you're having success there now, although I know it took time for you to make some sales. Since it works for you it makes sense for you to stay there, but you do yourself a disservice assuming that your experience there is typical. I suspect the overall sales rate is approaching industry standard, and on an average $2.5K sale your're paying approximately 35% commissions when you include the logo fee, which is around twice the industry standard. So for at least some sellers it makes sense not to stay on the BB platform.

Some of the changes I've seen over the last few years on BB:

* A couple of years ago all my sales there were at the listed price, while nowadays I get many requests from BB sales reps for discounts (which mostly come to nothing);
* Continued expansion of inventory levels has seen accompanies by decreases in overall sales %'s;
* I'm not aware of any new marketing activity or campaigns on their part, and in fact I don't believe they've announced anything in this department for a very long time;
* They are now less transparent with sellers than ever, and the move to Slack was a very clever move given that the free version of Slack only retains the last 10K messages so basically history there deletes itself. In fairness they got the discussion out of the public view (here) and into a private community (Slack), so from a business perspective this was a good move;
* Their narrow focus on brands is starting to get diluted with the addition of more generic names which many sellers would not consider to be brandable domains;

I think the industry as a whole, including brandables, is down this year. Perhaps the bumper sales year of 2015 lulled many domainers into a false state of overoptimism about how healthy the industry was.

FWIW I still admire what BB have done from a business perspective, and perhaps with hindsight I might even accept some of their practices as being good business decisions, albeit not in the best interests of sellers. But I'm afraid the gloss has dimmed significantly at this stage, at least for this seller.

YMMV of course.

 

[BlueprintMedia]

Because BrandBucket decided to do away with "Account Not In Good Standing", I decided to submit 25 names.
From those 25 names, only 8 names were approved.
Two weeks later, I got an email that one of those names SOLD.
The name was a 5letter.com. The name started with DEX.
If you don't know, DEX stands for Decentralized Exchange.

Purchased on NamePros for $10.
Sold on BrandBucket for $2,395
My proceeds from sale $1,575

 

[Brandworthy]

And what about the hours invested?

Time invested is absolutely a valid point. For those sellers who try to use as many GD coupons as possible, and vote for credits (now unavailable) do you consider how much time this adds to the process? I stopped using coupons/voting a long time ago since the opportunity cost of my time is quite high.

Coming back to my earlier figures, I've done a little digging. The following stats are based on 352 names I have listed:

Average cost of domain acquisition: $18.78
Listing cost: $10
Total average cost of BB domain listing: $28.78

So a little less than my initial $40 guess.

The average sale price of my 14 sales is $2205, so after commission and design costs my average revenue per sale was $1445.

So based on my history,
Cost of domains listed: $10,648
Cost of rejected domains (assume 50% - this is a very rough approximation): $6,949
Total cost (excl. time): $17,597
Total revenue: $20,223
Profit: $2,626
ROI: ~15%

A couple of notes: I haven't included any renewal costs, I have sold names they rejected, and I expect (hope perhaps) to sell more of the names I currently have listed, so my expected return is certainly higher than the above. Just 2 or 3 more sales of my currently listed domains would lift my ROI significantly.

Hopefully the above will be useful to others to temper expectations of huge ROI. It's probably an exception rather than the rule, and I suspect very difficult to scale. Thankfully other domain activities are performing well, so I can afford to wait and see if BB returns improve.

Final disclaimer: I might have really poor stats. There are probably some portfolio owners with far higher sales rates and ROI. However I know with certainty quite a few portfolio owners of similar size with far worse stats.

 

[bazabizo]

I think its time for me to help here by providing some stats as well... I have currently around 440 names PUBLISHED on BB, this number was 150 december-2014 and growing in a scalar format since then until 300 in March... that kept almost steady until I had 140 published over the past 2 weeks... I will try as much as possible to give you sales stats :

November 2014 : 1 Sale - 100 names there (around 6,000 Listed days)
January 2015 : 1 Sale - 200 names there (around 7000 listed days since sale before)
March 2015 : same as January 2015
April 2015 : 5 Sales, I had 300 names there, and it was 1 buyer that boiught them in bulk (for 10% additional discount). I would remove this from stats as its not within the norm! Most probably a Venture Capitalist bought them for a lot of his startups
May 2015 : 2 Sales : 2 Sales, 6,500 listed days since previous sale(s).
Since 29th of May 2015, I didnt sell a single domain name. Around 16,000 listed days since then.

I calculate listed days as the number of listed/published names * the number of days since the last sale

I am getting increasingly worried at the moment to be very honest. I will list the reasons below :
1) I started on BB hoping that I get a 3-5% sales a year, with anything below 3% making it not appealing for me! 3% means 13-14 sales a year(for 440 listed names), thats 1 sale every 4 weeks. Now I am 8 weeks since the last sale. I know its a probability thing and sometimes we have to wait to make sure its really correct and that a margin of error exists sometimes.

2) I removed my names from Brandroot as I mistakenly put 1 name in both of them, and I preferred to terminate the BR account than cause issues for BB. Yes, I am more loyal to BB as BR doesnt have any sort of professionalism in handling matters.

3) Most of my names arent Hand registered names, so they have a decent chance to sell OFF any brandable marketplace! AND they also get a decent traffic, so I think at least $50-100 monthly parking is lost!

4) I pay 30% to BB, and this leads to some sales being lost.

5) I dont have the chance to negotiate with the buyer.

6) Even if brandbucket has access to traffic sources from startups that we dont have, with 16K names inside, its almost useless for me!

7) I spent hours voting, and these hours cost me almost same as the 10$ listing fees. Thats $4,400 listing fees/time lost. I could have spent the same voting time to do email marketing for a couple of my high end domains. I might have had something out of it, rather than comparing 2 names for 100+ hours.

8) I spoke personally to Michael before being the MD at BB. They guy is really friendly and is someone capable of running this thing. I just want to highlight one important thing. There are a couple of sales channels :
a) Someone who presses the buy button on a self-service fashion. Fair for all
b) Someone who negotiates just the price. Fair for all
c) Someone who asks BB reps to nominate a name for them. UNFAIR FOR ALL OF US. I think our names arent brought up here as much as Michael's!

To cut it short for all of us, I think the past few pages have highlighted all our concerns, and its time for BB to give it a shot and correct some stuff. And YES, I am transforming from someone who used to get really excited with an accepted name, to someone who is considering moving out completely; Unfortunately

 

[Brandworthy]

Also had a small sale today - I * R * O * N * F * U * N * D - for low X,XXX. 15th sale so far on BB, and this name was listed on Jul 1 2014.

 

[bazabizo]

I sold S W I P E C L O U D , on BB last night... for low x,xxx. A LOOOONG sigh of relief, I look forward to more with BB Thanks Michael and the BB team!

 

[bazabizo]

Sold T R E N D C A P I T A L on BB for low to mid x,xxx
Now I can say we are back on track. 2 dry months, which was extremely disappointing , followed by 3 sales in 15 days! This proves that its all about numbers, and having quality names!
Thanks to the BB team, and I am looking forward to more continued business together.

 

[12345]

Here are my sales from August.

F I T H I T
C O B A S I C
F U N D I N G G R I D
P I M L Y
G I V E C L O U D
B O L D S I G N A L
R E A D Y T O P A Y
P I V O T F L O W
A M P S Y
B U I L D E R L Y
T Y P E S Y
T H I N C O D E
V O T E S Y
P E R F O R M L Y
S A F E R P A T H
P R O D U C T S T A C K

 

[AndrewRice]

Hi Everyone,
I had a short dry spell, but I just sold V*I*B*E*L*I*G*H*T.

@svede
I think the buying season is picking up right now, so if I were you I would get your names published.

 

[starizec]

Sold S l e e p D e c k
Was on site for about 40 days

 

[12345]

Hello, everyone.

Here are my October sales.

B A T T L E L A B
A P P C A N D Y
R I G H T M E T H O D
R O C K E T C H A T
R A N K O L O G Y
E L I T E L O G I C
C A P I T A L F R O N T
W O R K G R E A T
H E Y T H A N K S
R I I V E R
S T R E A M N I N J A
P L E D G E U P

If anyone has any questions or would like me to look at some names please email or PM me.

 

[KDN]

Just had my first sale! I'm so happy!

I will reveal the name after I receive the payment. I love you BrandBucket!

 

[AndrewRice]

Happy New Year!

I had a BB sale today:

G/I/V/E/K/A/R/M/A