Domain Name Wholesale Exchange DNWE Marketplace

[Lox]

The core concept is to move domain “liquidation” out of the forums and into a simple, easy to use platform with domain quality control and price control.

The platform is purposely exclusive to domain investors so that you can keep wholesale and retail prices completely separate at the same time. Example: Gamers (.co) Lander/Afternic - $20,000. DNWE - $1,285.

Sellers are charged 9% with all associated fees baked into the price.

Website: DNWE.com (Domain Name Wholesale Exchange)

NP @Josh R

 

[dirk]

Looking good. Was gonna sign up but they needed 2 domains to verify the user. How will you verify the domains @Josh R ?

 

[creataweb]

Excellent, will check it out.

 

[Lox]

... AND ...
Didn't take long for someone (NP member) to reg. DomainNameWholesaleExchange.com
(2020-02-12 @ 16:37:47)

For sale @ DAN

 

[creataweb]

DNWE is better anyway, that other name is kinda long

 

[Doron Vermaat]

Great initiative from Joshua. I've signed up, looked around and submitted a few domains. Other than the application being a little slow at times it looks well executed and easy to navigate.

The main challenges with a marketplace like this will be:

Hand curation: currently, all submissions are being manually reviewed. When the marketplace grows and more sellers will submit more names this will become a major bottleneck as we've seen with BrandBucket and most of the other marketplaces where some sort of manual approval en valuation process is in place.

Cheats: as the marketplace caters to domainers only you will soon find that buyers will try and bypass the marketplace and email the owner of a domain name directly to avoid the 9% commission.

Good luck Josh!

 

[DanSanchez]

Great looking site, I also signed up and hope to participate! Anything that can bring the market some added liquidity is a win in my mind. The 9% commission is frictionless. Ideally there will be listings above $1k and below $10k to target other investors in that liquid market. Did you intend for this to be a market where retail buyers come in as wholesale buyers, Josh?

 

[JoeCanadian]

Signed up.

 

[equity78]

Great looking site, I also signed up and hope to participate! Anything that can bring the market some added liquidity is a win in my mind. The 9% commission is frictionless. Ideally there will be listings above $1k and below $10k to target other investors in that liquid market. Did you intend for this to be a market where retail buyers come in as wholesale buyers, Josh?

I believe I saw a tweet that Josh wants it exclusive to domain investors.


Josh R


@DailyDomaining
The platform is purposely exclusive to domain investors so that you can keep wholesale and retail prices completely separate at the same time.
Example: http://Gamers.co Lander/Afternic - $20,000.
DNWE - $1,285.

https://twitter.com/DailyDomaining/status/1227444822509858816
https://help.twitter.com/using-twitter/how-to-tweet#source-labels

 

[capybara]

Anything promoting the "wholesale" concept is eventually going to lead to more people unwilling to pay above "wholesale" level.

– Hey, I want to upgrade my business domain name to XXXXZZZZ.com and its for sale at GoDaddy for $15000. Do you think I should buy it?
– Don't buy it there! These scumbags squatters take your for a fool. It can be bought for $1500 at DNWE.com.

Having said that, as a buyer I see a great opportunity in it. Also the site looks neat and very well made. Kudos to J. R.

 

[xeroox]

Anything promoting the "wholesale" concept is eventually going to lead to more people unwilling to pay above "wholesale" level.

– Hey, I want to upgrade my business domain name to XXXXZZZZ.com and its for sale at GoDaddy for $15000. Do you think I should buy it?
– Don't buy it there! These scumbags squatters take your for a fool. It can be bought for $1500 at DNWE.com.

Having said that, as a buyer I see a great opportunity in it. Also the site looks neat and very well made. Kudos to J. R.

It's for domainers

I believe I saw a tweet that Josh wants it exclusive to domain investors.


Josh R


@DailyDomaining
The platform is purposely exclusive to domain investors so that you can keep wholesale and retail prices completely separate at the same time.
Example: http://Gamers.co Lander/Afternic - $20,000.
DNWE - $1,285.

https://twitter.com/DailyDomaining/status/1227444822509858816

 

[Dream Domain]

Very good idea. Signed up for an account.

 

[FlipperC]

exclusive to domainers. good idea!

the owners of namepros should be ver very afraid. josh eat their lunch. the whole idea of using a forum to sell domains whole sale is silly. everything visible to google here but not at dnwe.

 

[Internet.Domains]

A marketplace exclusive to domainers. How many domainers are there? If you got 100% participation from domainers, how big is that market?

 

[RJ]

Looking good @Josh R ! I just signed up to try it.

exclusive to domainers. good idea!

the owners of namepros should be ver very afraid. josh eat their lunch. the whole idea of using a forum to sell domains whole sale is silly. everything visible to google here but not at dnwe.

It's always good to have alternatives. NamePros still has 0% commission for reseller-to-reseller transactions and a trader-rating system that references over a decade of transactions. :justsayin:

 

[Lox]

How many domainers are there?

+/- 50k
[ not counting CAG folks (come and go) ]

 

[Internet.Domains]

+/- 50k
[ not counting CAG folks (come and go) ]

You think it's that high on a consistent basis? I would presume there would be much more activity at conferences, in forum, in blogs if the number was anywhere near that high on a consistent basis.

It was mentioned that there was about 1000 attendees at Namescon. That number includes the companies that offer product and services, but don't necessarily "domain" on a regular basis.

If we had anywhere near 50k on a regular basis the forum, blogs and conferences would be popping large.

 

[Lox]

You think it's that high on a consistent basis? I would presume there would be much more activity at conferences, in forum, in blogs if the number was anywhere near that high on a consistent basis.

It was mentioned that there was about 1000 attendees at Namescon. That number includes the companies that offer product and services, but don't necessarily "domain" on a regular basis.

If we had anywhere near 50k on a regular basis the forum, blogs and conferences would be popping large.

The number of 50k is based on active portfolios (liquid: reg/buy & sell - 2017-Q3 2019). Blogs & Forums (in english); in reality there are more readers vs contributors (1:10.000+). Regarding "domainer" related conferences/events ... what makes them important? I attend Tech/Internet/AI/DNS events every year and I've found the NC or ex Domaining Europe more or less exhibition based. You'll benefit more from the Web Summit and The Next Web, IT & Tech, DNS, IoT, AI events or pro meetings s.a. Asheville. There are different types of gatherings/small events related to DN/DNS around the world.

Regards

 

[karmaco]

By the language of “only accepting investor quality” domains I believe alot of people will be disappointed when their names aren’t accepted. They are looking for really good names you are willing to sell cheap.

Good names are somewhat subjective as is the term wholesale pricing. Good idea but I believe there will be kinks.

 

[NameFit]

Good effort but we have to keep in mind few things

1. Domain/Domain price are very subjective. If the domains are moderated, then it may very well turn out to be curated marketplace like many others but with 'alternative' pricing.

Not saying that, but if the purpose is to have 'two pricing system' - 'then make it clear'. Accept the names that have been accepted in other 'curated marketplaces'. That way you do not disappoint sellers when their names are rejected. That goes for price too. Make a rule that they cannot quote something like 20% of what they have quoted in other places. But that approach has pitfall too, many domainers have good names and they never list it in other marketplaces. Or you can have hybrid model - if accepted in other marketplaces, they are in. Rest moderated.

2. One always has to focus on 'who their audience is'. Is it domainers (as resellers) or end users? Would end users be ever login to the site - highly unlikely. Looking at the name itself, they will think it is an 'exchange'. With that said, domainers being audience - there are very little margins, so not sure if 9% commission would be worth your efforts.

3. Whois verification will be not be that easy. Since there will be lot of exchanges, then it will make it tough.

Overall, good effort, but management will be tough. So yo do deserve 9% commission. As always, listen to audience, user actions (technically) and work towards making it better. There is lot of learning as we go along. You always have to carefully look at plus and negative points of each feature and align it with your business goals. Business goals have to be very clear - always.

Best.

 

[Josh R]

Hey Everyone -

I wanted to address a few things.

1) The 9% commission includes all Escrow fees. For now Escrow.com is the only transaction method while this concept is in the beta phase. Depending on how things progress we may actually facilitate smaller transactions and/or incorporate more payment options. With this commission structure including escrow fees we're certainly going to operate in the red for quite some time. I'm happy to do so if the platform continues to gain traction with the community.

2) I've already declined a hefty amount of submissions. While I want to include a wide range of domains, it's imperative that the quality is good and the prices are wholesale (otherwise the buyers will soon lose faith). If you've got a good domain publicly listed at $8,000, the expectation is that it's listed for significantly less on DNWE.

Example:

GolfDay {.com} $19,000 Public BIN
GolfDay {.com} $999 DNWE BIN
This domain is reg'd in 10 tlds, created 1996, clear commercial retail value, good comparable sales.. Think to yourself - Could this name sell for $1,000 at GD expired auctions?

If I decline your names It's not because I want to. It's because I have to so that we give this a chance of success. My advice is that you only submit names that you truly want to liquidate.

3) We are currently allowing 10 submissions per day. That is going to be changed to 5 shorty.

Why? As mentioned we've had some very low quality or highly priced submissions. I don't want to charge silly submission fees so hopefully by lowering the number of submissions per day people will be a little more selective on domains and pricing.

4) We already have roughly 200 sign ups from many very well known buyers in the industry so if you do want to move names there will be eyeballs.

5) All accounts are manually approved. We can't guarantee that an end-user won't somehow find us and slip through the cracks but all users are manually vetted before approval. We are requiring two domains to verify via whois so that we can associate the user with some kind of "domainer" status. The most important factor is that it's obviously a private platform so none of the domains will be indexed or shown in public. An end-user outside of our industry that wants to buy your name will not find it on DNWE.

6) We had email delivery issues which are solved for now (fingers crossed). Most of you that signed up have been approved (even if you didn't receive the approval email). You can now login to the platform and familiarize yourself with it. It's quite simple and basic for now but I have A LOT of product features in the pipeline and do intend to follow through with them if I continue to get the support from our great community.

7) When you list a domain you won't see it in the buy section of your portal because you are the seller. Know once you publish a domain IT IS listed for everyone else to see in the "buy" section. I'm looking to tweak this so that sellers can see their names listed in the buy section as well but just wanted to clarify that for everyone.

8) There are a few bugs but I'm all about releasing things early and often so that I can get feedback from the users. Like i said, I have a lot of things in the pipeline and intend for this to be a long term project that changes the way domain investors sell their domains in a wholesale environment.

Please remember, I'm a 1 man squad at the moment with limited time and a lot of demand. I am considering a partner at this point and have already had talks with 1 person in particular. We'll see how things progress from here but I'm pretty accessible and I appreciate the support and feedback.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thanks for the clear answers to many questions from the community @Josh R and best wishes for the initiative.

I apologize if this was clearly said before or in signup (I have not tried to sign up) but are you personally making all acceptance decisions on each submission re quality/price or is it some group decision? I see your comment re one-man but perhaps expanding. I see, particularly for acceptance, some virtue in it being not in any one person's hands.

I am glad that you are at least considering down the road options other than Escrow.com. While many, perhaps most, transactions may be best dealt with through that service, clearly there are choices which are not. For example if two domain investors both have the majority of their domain names on Epik, who is also the registrar and can confirm both the two in the transaction and the status of the domain name, and want to do a transaction there, it seems that should be allowed. But the main reason that Escrow.com should not be the only choice is that there are dozens of countries, some very active in domain investing, where such payouts are not supported. The list is here, but for example it includes Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan and many other countries that are not supported, including much of the Middle East. Also domainers from the US state of Alabama are eliminated!

I wish you every success with this initiative, and clearly it has been well thought out. 200 sign ups already is very impressive, and I have seen on Twitter many major names in the world of domaining who are already signed up.

Best wishes, and thank you for sharing the answers here on NamePros.

Bob

 

[Josh R]

Thanks for the clear answers to many questions from the community @Josh R and best wishes for the initiative.

I apologize if this was clearly said before or in signup (I have not tried to sign up) but are you personally making all acceptance decisions on each submission re quality/price or is it some group decision? I see your comment re one-man but perhaps expanding. I see, particularly for acceptance, some virtue in it being not in any one person's hands.

I am glad that you are at least considering down the road options other than Escrow.com. While many, perhaps most, transactions may be best dealt with through that service, clearly there are choices which are not. For example if two domain investors both have the majority of their domain names on Epik, who is also the registrar and can confirm both the two in the transaction and the status of the domain name, and want to do a transaction there, it seems that should be allowed. But the main reason that Escrow.com should not be the only choice is that there are dozens of countries, some very active in domain investing, where such payouts are not supported. The list is here, but for example it includes Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan and many other countries that are not supported, including much of the Middle East. Also domainers from the US state of Alabama are eliminated!

I wish you every success with this initiative, and clearly it has been well thought out. 200 sign ups already is very impressive, and I have seen on Twitter many major names in the world of domaining who are already signed up.

Best wishes, and thank you for sharing the answers here on NamePros.

Bob

Hi Bob - It's just me for now. That may need to change very shortly.

In regards to Escrow - I agree. We actually only accept registration from Countries/Regions that are supported by Escrow.com at the moment.

Ideal? Not at all but I'm trying to take things one step at a time.

Josh

 

[equity78]

Hi Bob - It's just me for now. That may need to change very shortly.

In regards to Escrow - I agree. We actually only accept registration from Countries/Regions that are supported by Escrow.com at the moment.

Ideal? Not at all but I'm trying to take things one step at a time.

Josh

Better to take your time and grow how you want, not trying to be all things to all people.

 

[Kassey Lee]

The idea is excellent if Josh can curate the domains and make the prices truly wholesale. I really hope you'll succeed and therefore disrupt the industry. I just joined and was approved but could not get in because of no Escrow account. I'd like to see Epik as additional option. All the best.