BrandBucket VS BrandRoot - Which one do you think is better?

[Justin Matmor]

The best way to find out if BR or BB are a good playform to sell your domains, approach them as an end user and see how quickly they respond, how hard they try to sell you a domain, and whether or not they are professional.

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

Hi Keith, I apologize for the lack of communication and problems on your seller application. This was a gate we put up immediately after we ran into a very expensive PR issue that cost us some reputation with a big buyer and a financial loss for our company. Since this implementation we have had almost no issues with unethical/problem sellers.

As for "prompt and courteous communication" I'm not sure where you saw/experienced this deficiency, but if you did please understand we are still a startup with tons on our plate, buyers (the ones who keep us in business) take precedence over other issues since our resources were (and still are in some respects) limited. If you were to go back in time and consider the BB communication experience during their beginning years, you would find it was awful and sometimes straight-up rude, again a huge part of the reason I started Brandroot. Our communication is far ahead of where there's was at at this time.





Hi Joe(?), thank you for your message. I understand your points and I happen to have some extra time to write.

"What this means is that the only way BR will ever welcome me, is if I've already paid my dues and built a portfolio with BB."

No. We do periodically review applications but we we are unable to do it very often because we don't want to be become a marketplace that has more names than we can reasonably sell. The reason we see so many people leaving BB is because of their lack of sales. Even their few names at Brandroot are selling while their majority of names listed at BB are lost in the shuffle. We can't possibly make the same mistake that BB has. They decided to start listing thousands of names per month.

"It's a shame BR can't manage inventory and communication a bit better"

Our communication is just fine. This is an issue primarily about seller applicants. You'll find little to no complaints from our sellers about our communication. And we manage our inventory very intentionally. A mismanaged inventory is what we see at BB. Our inventory grows as we grow. We are nearly doubling our number of sales from last year so our goal is to double our inventory. BrandBucket however panicked when they lost traction with search engines so they began accepting anything and everything to monetize at least on type-in traffic. Their poor sales rate is a testament to this. They expanded because their company wasn't, Brandroot will expand as the company does.

A mismanaged inventory is one where you have warehouses full of unsold stock. The longer that inventory sits the more that stock is devalued and/or restless. In the case of BB, it's both. As sellers become restless, waiting for that periodic sale, they are renewing their domains, devaluing their domain portfolio. This is why Brandroot is seeing so many sellers move to us. So why do we accept/charm them over to us instead of accepting new sellers to grow?

1. They are trusted, seasoned sellers and they tend to buy mostly attractive names that are more likely to attract our buyers.
2. They have the numbers. When we are trying to expand our inventory with our sales growth we want to do it fairly quickly. In 2016 we will over double our inventory from last year, which is planned and intentional. We are able to do this because of the many BB sellers who have moved to us, not because of the new sellers who have a handful of domains. But also numbers suggests maturity and discipline in the business.
3. They are restless. They are ready to try a different method and it's unlikely they will move again.
4. They cause less trouble. Maybe that sounds overcritical or overgeneralized but it really is true (at least for us). When we were accepting tons of new sellers it was difficult to track and manage...
   1. People were selling names and leaving them published at Brandroot.
   2. Many were allowing their domains to expire because it was more of a fickle hobby they dabbled in for a short time.
   3. We had many people who had 10 or less published domains and they were the most demanding and disappointed about a lack in sales. This wasted way too much of our limited time.
5. BB is where they are at. Most brandable domainers with a significant number of domains are already with BB. So that is naturally where we have to look in order to grow our marketplace, which has worked thus far.

I could go on more but that's enough I think. We accept new sellers when we have a deficiency of sellers who don't have the numbers we are looking for. If you have the number and you're interested PM me.

"BB will have my loyalty for giving me a chance and responding to my submissions in a timely fashion"

This is honorable of you but you'll soon find it's the money that talks. BB's immediate response is in their best interest. If they were slow then they may lose your domain sale to someone who types it in before it gets listed with them. But I do wish you the best of luck with them. Of course there are many who are successful at BB. We have referred countless interested sellers to list with BB. They obviously have the systems and processes in place to handle any number of sellers.

If you were going to ignore again me again why did you ask if I have BR account or not ?
I am sure you dont wanna hear bad experiences but atleast you replied to Keith and Joe .


I have strong reasons to what Arch ? said after your latest reply

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

If you were to go back in time and consider the BB communication experience during their beginning years, you would find it was awful and sometimes straight-up rude, again a huge part of the reason I started Brandroot. Our communication is far ahead of where there's was at at this time.

You seem to be focusing all your efforts on BB when infact you should focus on your (company)

No. We do periodically review applications but we we are unable to do it very often because we don't want to be become a marketplace that has more names than we can reasonably sell

Since you are unable to periodically review applications and dont want them , why dont you close the application form and inform those users sending you everyday news ? This is of course to your OWN benefit ,

If you were to go back in time and consider the BB communication experience during their beginning years, you would find it was awful and sometimes straight-up rude, again a huge part of the reason I started Brandroot. Our communication is far ahead of where there's was at at this time.

So if BB was bad it means you get the right to be bad ? WOW .,..What a reply!

Our communication is just fine. This is an issue primarily about seller applicants. You'll find little to no complaints from our sellers about our communication. And we manage our inventory very intentionally. A mismanaged inventory is what we see at BB. Our inventory grows as we grow. We are nearly doubling our number of sales from last year so our goal is to double our inventory. BrandBucket however panicked when they lost traction with search engines so they began accepting anything and everything to monetize at least on type-in traffic. Their poor sales rate is a testament to this. They expanded because their company wasn't, Brandroot will expand as the company does.

Again focusing on BB and trying to divert all attention from your OWN problems.

In the case of BB, it's both

WOW ... You must be doing great maketing for BB. The number of times you mentioned in your post is uncountable

BB is where they are at. Most brandable domainers with a significant number of domains are already with BB. So that is naturally where we have to look in order to grow our marketplace, which has worked thus far.

So simply trying to snatch sellers from BB? I just remembered the whole RENEWAL it ,and I am glad it backfired well.

I could go on more but that's enough I think. We accept new sellers when we have a deficiency of sellers who don't have the numbers we are looking for. If you have the number and you're interested PM me.

Again, It would would be for your OWN (company's) goood to actually try to close the new seller application form and inform your potential sellers.



One more thing, I would recruit @Grilled as your marketing vocal point ( if you haven't done so already ) cause HE would do much much better job than every time diverting all the attention to BB:P

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

In the last few minutes I've received 81 emails from BrandRoot. Three were addressed to me and the 78 others were addressed to other sellers and included their real life name, their username and their email address. The 81 emails were divided into three subject headings:

1. Please Verify Your Account at BrandRoot (18)
   
2. A Seller Account Has Been Closed (30)
   
3. Your Seller Account Has Been Closed (33)

I'm sure this is due to a system error but just curious did anyone else get these 81 emails?

PS @Doron Vermaat, you were one of the recipients listed in one of the emails. Did you get this giant set of emails too?

Keith , thank you for sharing this. You have done tremendous favor to BR and their sellers by disclosing it.

 

[JimJammy]

We can't possibly make the same mistake that BB has. They decided to start listing thousands of names per month.

You had 7,000 names in March, now (May) you have over 9,000.

BrandBucket however panicked when they lost traction with search engines so they began accepting anything and everything to monetize at least on type-in traffic. Their poor sales rate is a testament to this.

BBs Alexa is around 32K, BRs is at 71K. They are smashing you on traffic! If you know Alexa, half your figure doesn't mean double the traffic, it's more likely 5-10 times your traffic. You've mentioned in earlier posts that most of your traffic comes from search engines, BB talks about relationships with agencies and their marketing efforts. Do you do anything other than rely on search engines and attending domain events?

They clearly don't accept everything and anything. They had 28,000 names on site in March. Now they have 29,500. So they accepted less than you... and you accepted their rejects.

Poor sales rate? 841 sales last year, $2.4million in sales, average sale price of almost $3,000. I don't believe you've shared your figures?

They cause less trouble. Maybe that sounds overcritical or overgeneralized but it really is true (at least for us).
We had many people who had 10 or less published domains and they were the most demanding and disappointed about a lack in sales. This wasted way too much of our limited time.

This is something I can 100% understand! Several people have spent many months causing 'trouble' in the BB thread. NP members that had few or no names listed on BB, demanding information. They drained BBs time and resources, leaving them less time to concentrate on business. But, you've recently accepted them...

I know there are others here that have openly stated that they would never list their domains with you (for various reasons) and I'm really not in that camp. I just can't see the benefits of moving my 600+ portfolio over to you:

Same listing fees.
Same commission fees.
Your average sale price is less.
You don't provide any financial information to your sellers (only this week did you disclose that you own 11%+ of the domains on your marketplace).
You don't provide any information on what your users are searching for.
You charge extra for featured listings.
You accept stale unsold stock from another marketplace.
You don't respond to seller applications.
No evidence of actively seeking buyers list since all of your traffic comes from search engines.
And for the second time, your userbase real life names, their usernames and their email address has been distributed amongst your members recently.

 

[hookbox]

You had 7,000 names in March, now (May) you have over 9,000.



BBs Alexa is around 32K, BRs is at 71K. They are smashing you on traffic! If you know Alexa, half your figure doesn't mean double the traffic, it's more likely 5-10 times your traffic. You've mentioned in earlier posts that most of your traffic comes from search engines, BB talks about relationships with agencies and their marketing efforts. Do you do anything other than rely on search engines and attending domain events?

They clearly don't accept everything and anything. They had 28,000 names on site in March. Now they have 29,500. So they accepted less than you... and you accepted their rejects.

Poor sales rate? 841 sales last year, $2.4million in sales, average sale price of almost $3,000. I don't believe you've shared your figures?



This is something I can 100% understand! Several people have spent many months causing 'trouble' in the BB thread. NP members that had few or no names listed on BB, demanding information. They drained BBs time and resources, leaving them less time to concentrate on business. But, you've recently accepted them...

I know there are others here that have openly stated that they would never list their domains with you (for various reasons) and I'm really not in that camp. I just can't see the benefits of moving my 600+ portfolio over to you:

Same listing fees.
Same commission fees.
Your average sale price is less.
You don't provide any financial information to your sellers (only this week did you disclose that you own 11%+ of the domains on your marketplace).
You don't provide any information on what your users are searching for.
You charge extra for featured listings.
You accept stale unsold stock from another marketplace.
You don't respond to seller applications.
No evidence of actively seeking buyers list since all of your traffic comes from search engines.
And for the second time, your userbase real life names, their usernames and their email address has been distributed amongst your members recently.

Once again you don't know what you're talking about. There has been well over 2,000 names transferred from their system in this time frame. Every time a name is removed from the BB system it is subtracted from the total. So today BB's total reads 29,637 but when taking into account how many domains have been removed by sellers because of lack of sales or whatever reason then the true total is 31,637. So in reality BB has added almost double what Brandroot has added in your time frame. Here are the biggest days below that BB sellers have transferred out their domains with their totals. Days where the count was under 50 I didn't even include. So the real transfer out number is much larger then what is here.

1,465 names removed from BrandBucket in your time frame

March 23 61

march 27 64

april 2 232

april 27 52

april 29 68

april 30 84

may 1 361

may 2 65

may 18 105

may 22 194

may 23 179

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

You had 7,000 names in March, now (May) you have over 9,000.



BBs Alexa is around 32K, BRs is at 71K. They are smashing you on traffic! If you know Alexa, half your figure doesn't mean double the traffic, it's more likely 5-10 times your traffic. You've mentioned in earlier posts that most of your traffic comes from search engines, BB talks about relationships with agencies and their marketing efforts. Do you do anything other than rely on search engines and attending domain events?

They clearly don't accept everything and anything. They had 28,000 names on site in March. Now they have 29,500. So they accepted less than you... and you accepted their rejects.

Poor sales rate? 841 sales last year, $2.4million in sales, average sale price of almost $3,000. I don't believe you've shared your figures?



This is something I can 100% understand! Several people have spent many months causing 'trouble' in the BB thread. NP members that had few or no names listed on BB, demanding information. They drained BBs time and resources, leaving them less time to concentrate on business. But, you've recently accepted them...

I know there are others here that have openly stated that they would never list their domains with you (for various reasons) and I'm really not in that camp. I just can't see the benefits of moving my 600+ portfolio over to you:

Same listing fees.
Same commission fees.
Your average sale price is less.
You don't provide any financial information to your sellers (only this week did you disclose that you own 11%+ of the domains on your marketplace).
You don't provide any information on what your users are searching for.
You charge extra for featured listings.
You accept stale unsold stock from another marketplace.
You don't respond to seller applications.
No evidence of actively seeking buyers list since all of your traffic comes from search engines.
And for the second time, your userbase real life names, their usernames and their email address has been distributed amongst your members recently.

You nailed it. Now a true company with great vision and commitment to stellar service would take note of your points and my points and use them as a base to reach even 80% of the level of BB :D

 

[Coral Cove]

BBs Alexa is around 32K, BRs is at 71K. They are smashing you on traffic! If you know Alexa, half your figure doesn't mean double the traffic, it's more likely 5-10 times your traffic. You've mentioned in earlier posts that most of your traffic comes from search engines, BB talks about relationships with agencies and their marketing efforts. Do you do anything other than rely on search engines and attending domain events?

This doesn't account for the number of domains removed from their platform, and I also mentioned that this recent growth is intentional. We have to keep up with our buyers.

They clearly don't accept everything and anything. They had 28,000 names on site in March. Now they have 29,500. So they accepted less than you... and you accepted their rejects.

Poor sales rate? 841 sales last year, $2.4million in sales, average sale price of almost $3,000. I don't believe you've shared your figures?

Alexa is an awful tool to use. Someone recently posted screenshots on how high our organic traffic numbers are compared to BB's. Of course with almost 30k names they are getting more traffic but comparatively we are ahead of BB on almost all metrics.

Of course we don't just rely on search engines. We don't have almost 9,000 Facebook followers, 6,000 email subscribers, and tons of online reviews on various sites for doing nothing. Actually Margot asked me about my success with subscribers then soon included the feature herself on BB. We also often spend thousands per month on advertising and marketing. Very recently, no, because we are working hard on first improving the site on mobile devices.

In 2015 we sold 289 names out of about 6,000 (maybe less) published names at the END of the year (so realistically the sales rate is higher). That's a 4.8% sales rate overall (2016 looking even better). Let's just say BB had an estimated 22,000 names listed by the end of 2015. That's 3.8% with your 841 sales report.

And as mentioned, our average sale price is around $2,000, BB's being higher because this is including a couple very high sales in the $XXX,XXX range.

Not to mention, we have way, WAY fewer sellers than BB. So the 289 sales we had went to a handful of people as opposed to their 841 being spread across who knows how many, all just reaping a small reward, perhaps a couple scraping out of living, like Mr. Krell.

I know there are others here that have openly stated that they would never list their domains with you (for various reasons) and I'm really not in that camp. I just can't see the benefits of moving my 600+ portfolio over to you:

Same listing fees.
Same commission fees.
Your average sale price is less.
You don't provide any financial information to your sellers (only this week did you disclose that you own 11%+ of the domains on your marketplace).
You don't provide any information on what your users are searching for.
You charge extra for featured listings.
You accept stale unsold stock from another marketplace.
You don't respond to seller applications.
No evidence of actively seeking buyers list since all of your traffic comes from search engines.
And for the second time, your userbase real life names, their usernames and their email address has been distributed amongst your members recently.

You had 7,000 names in March, now (May) you have over 9,000.

We never asked you to move over your 600+ domains. Most of the people that have moved over are people who have reached out to us. Actually I think we only successfully recruited 2 people from BB and that was a long time ago when we sent out that "aggressive" email. The others have all come to us asking to move their domains. We have asked a few people recently with no success though.

Anyway, to address those items:

• For our special and partner accounts they pay only $8
• Yes, same commission. I believe it's the lowest sustainable number. Not sure how a marketplace could make it by asking for less. We made that mistake earlier on when we lowered the commission for a select few.
• I think you would find that your sales are no higher than the sales of our sellers. Around 80% of our sales are at full asking price. Browse our marketplace and let me know if you feel our prices are overall lower than BB's
• We have shared financial information. Several times actually. I can't keep up with every thread and every request for financial data. We also have sent out this info to our sellers privately.
• We do provide information on what is being searched by our visitors. In fact, when publishing a name you are provided with keywords to select from that our visitors are searching for. We've taken the time to document the top 400+ (and growing) keywords searched, and use that strategically for search engines and CTR and sales. Each of these keywords has their own unique page with a short description. And this is just the start of how we handle searches.
• Nearly all of the current Spotlight names you see on Brandroot were free upgrades. We very often upgrade the names of our sellers for free. Not only because we need to keep featured sections full but we offer these as incentives and as appreciation positions.
• I'm not sure what you mean by stale, unsold stock. For whatever reason this stale, unsold stock is selling better at Brandroot, which is why so many have moved over recently.
• We do respond to seller applications but not as often as our applicants would like. We regulate our inventory, as I explained in a previous post.
• We not only market heavily to our market, especially on Facebook, but we also advertise and market in the most unlikely of places, like to various kinds of investors. I can't begin to explain to you the depth and stretch of our marketing. Search engine traffic is a great traffic resource for our new visitors but for the 20%+ return visitors and repeat buyers we don't depend on this alone, not by a long shot. What evidence are you looking for?
• Every company, even the largest in the world, make mistakes. When you're a target of relentless cyber attacks something is bound to break. We do know that this same mistake won't happen again. I don't want to name any names but we have made some folks pretty upset lately. Where you find success you'll often find it's jealous counterpart. There's not a lot you can do about that.

 

[Billy Wagner]

several independent contractors that we pay monthly

How do I apply for a job? :D

 

[JimJammy]

Thank you for taking the time to respond, it is appreciated.

This doesn't account for the number of domains removed from their platform

Yes, you are right. Thank you.

Of course with almost 30k names they are getting more traffic but comparatively we are ahead of BB on almost all metrics.

You keep stating (in various ways) that BB has plummeted out of the search engines. This is clearly not the case, nor are you ahead on almost all metrics.

In 2015 we sold 289 names out of about 6,000 (maybe less) published names at the END of the year (so realistically the sales rate is higher). That's a 4.8% sales rate overall (2016 looking even better). Let's just say BB had an estimated 22,000 names listed by the end of 2015. That's 3.8% with your 841 sales report.

Isn't this twisting your figures to suit?
Shouldn't it be the average number of domains listed through the year divided by the number of sales?

Or we can work it out your way properly:
BR - 289 sales x $2K average price = $578,000 / 6,000 domains = average domain sales value is $96
BB - 841 sales x $3K average price = $2,400,000 / 22,000 = average domain sales value is $109

So I'd still be better off listing at BB your way, as my average domain sales value is 13% higher.

And as mentioned, our average sale price is around $2,000, BB's being higher because this is including a couple very high sales in the $XXX,XXX range.

.
Yes, they had a big sale that they published here But only 9 of their last 40 sales were under your $2K average. The others were over. That's where their $3K average sales price per domain comes from. See attached.

The fact you've been open about favoring some, but not other, members with acceptance into your site, reduced listing fees and featured listings is admirable, but un-nerves me.

Again, I appreciate that you've taken the time to respond but I feel I'm much better off exactly where I am. Best of luck with your business

 

[Coral Cove]

Thank you for taking the time to respond, it is appreciated.

Again, I appreciate that you've taken the time to respond but I feel I'm much better off exactly where I am. Best of luck with your business

Show attachment 31428 Show attachment 31429

And I'm sure you're right. Many BB sellers are perfectly fine where they are. We've turned down several requests from individuals to move names to Brandroot. We don't want them all. My response wasn't to excite you over. We have more than enough submissions to deal with. Lately we can hardly keep up.