I think I would say that any of these three, or in fact others, can work absolutely fine. As
@xynames says the visits to your site via people typing in the name does not depend on lander (some argue that one can somewhat get some landers search recognized but I think that is probably very rare to a significant degree).
Your traffic will not vary no matter what style of landing pages you use
So the important question is not visits but do some help better with conversion. I think it is probably true, as xynames has said, that well experienced investors with large quality portfolios may be able to close at least as well, perhaps much better, on their own landers at reduced commission costs.
But if one is relatively new, or do not want the hassle of running a website and handling your own interactions, then one of the marketplace landers can be a good choice. I suspect for most newcomers with small portfolios it is the right choice. Here are my thoughts on the ones you mention....
- Afternic/GoDaddy stress talking or emailing a broker. They have 24hr coverage, someone to answer the phone, and probably help close a lot of sales through that expertise that an inexperienced investor without marketing skills might lose. I personally hate not being given the price when I am buying something, so wonder at their strategy of requiring an interaction just to get a price, but clearly they are big and smart and have evidence to support that approach. Other than the absence of a price, the lander looks fine to me, and the GoDaddy badge helps obviously.
- DAN. To me their landers while possibly slightly bland to some do engender trust. They just to me look professional and elegant. They also allow you to easily add descriptions for each domain name if you like. They have payment plans for names valued $495 and up as well as a rental option. I think those help close some sales. DAN landers are super easy to set up and protect us from making bad lander design choices.
- Epik I love the visual look of their landers, whether you use their images or add your own. You can cleanly offer Buy-It-Now, Make Offer, and start a Payment Plan. I also love that their landers are in fact tiny websites and you can add lots of text if you want, images, links, etc. It can be argued that you can get some names to search rank. Probably to a slight degree - I have a few that I see are Alexa 5M but none that I know of Alexa 1M. A Google search with my term plus word domain name will show some DAN listings on page one so not sure the difference is that much. The Epik ones, when you do get an inquiry, provide you with name, email, phone as well as IP address, whereas DAN provide you essentially with just initials and the offer information.
In addition to the ones you mention, there are other choices which I think should be considered.
- NoDynadot Not as much choice in design (3 essentially) but their landers are not bad and when sales do happen their commissions are very reasonable. I think there is an additional fee for withdrawing funds (might be wrong - the few small sales I did there I just used money to register or renew domains). You can without cost (other than sales commission) start an auction or do a fixed price sale.
- NameSilo Not many people talk about their landers, but I love the look (I use number 3, but they have five choices). To me they are elegant. Good commission rate. They allow you to offer payment plans.
- Sedo You now have choices with just landers or with parking. They are of course a major long-term aftermarket, like Afternic. Their landers allow you to show the price directly. They too have a series of agents. A wide variety of images for the traditional landers, or clean simplistic in the new ones.
- Efty So you need a membership past the trial period, and you will handle your own negotiations, but not otherwise pay commissions except those associated with the payment/escrow. They offer tons of choices in customization of landers. If you plan to never have your own website their marketplace feature (you use one of your domain names, or now a subdomain) to set up what is essentially your domain portfolio website without any programming or website development.
Note that you can also make other listings effectively landers. I sometimes set the forwarding to point to my Namecheap Marketplace listings so they essentially become landers.
I think with respect to landers we are fortunate to have many excellent choices. Thanks for the question and thread,
@GoldenApple and best wishes for domain success.
Bob
