I am Doron Vermaat, co-founder of Efty, Ask Me Anything!

[Doron Vermaat]

Hey NamePros

My name is Doron Vermaat. I am a co-founder of Efty and have been a domain name investor since 2012.

I have also been an active member of the forum before, but it's been a while!

I am back and looking forward to actively participating again in this community in both a professional capacity, representing our company and as an investor, talking about domains and the aftermarket.

Ask me Anything!

 

[Future Sensors]

Hi Doron. Great to see you here in the AMA. Thanks for developing Efty Pay. Can you tell us a little more about how domain investors can implement Efty Pay and also which marketplaces have already implemented Efty Pay?

 

[Doron Vermaat]

Hi Doron. Great to see you here in the AMA. Thanks for developing EftyPay. Can you tell us a little more about how domain investors can implement EftyPay and also which marketplaces have already implemented EftyPay?

We have a phased rollout strategy with Efty Pay, designed to progressively introduce new features while actively incorporating feedback from our community of sellers and buyers.

Efty Investor is the first integrator for Efty Pay. This means that Efty Investor subscribers can connect their accounts to Efty Pay and create, track, and manage Efty Pay transactions right from within their Efty Investor account. They can soon enable Efty Pay as the Buy-It-Now payment provider for their landing pages and marketplace.

Soon after, we launch our Partnership API, which will allow anyone to bring the power of Efty Pay to their app, marketplace, registrar, or website.

You can find the complete product roadmap for Efty Pay in our latest blog post here.

 

[Future Sensors]

I look forward to seeing Efty Pay integrated into NamePros Parking as soon as possible.

 

[Mister Funsky]

I have also been an active member of the forum before, but it's been a while!

Glad to see you back here and active!

 

[Doron Vermaat]

Glad to see you back here and active!

I look forward to seeing Efty Pay integrated into NamePros Parking as soon as possible.

I just responded to a message from the NamePros team regarding this. It would be cool to integrate with NamePros landers—our partnership program API is developed for those types of partnerships!

 

[DomainGist]

Is Efty moving its business model away from custom marketplaces?

I walked away from domaining 4 years ago to build an eCom business, now making a slow return to domaining with just 7 .com domains under my ownership (14 now actually, 7 purchases in the past week) but with the aim of growing that to 2500 within 18 months, I'm going in hard with a six figure budget.

I'm looking at custom marketplace options, at the moment Atom just blows Efty out of the water, particularly aesthetically.

The Efty stores look exactly the same now as they did 4 years ago.... are there any plans to improve these in the near future, or is this part of the business effectively mothballed and have you pivoted towards being a marketplace and payment processor? If so, why, just surrendering to competition?

 

[JB Lions]

Where is the best place for suggestions. I’ve been a subscriber I think for 6+ years but have been using Dan landers the last few. I searched an old post from 2019 asking about being able to add domains to more than 1 category, front page customization, ability to add extra pages, have to find my old posts think there was more.

Since Dan is going away want to test some of my domains with some other options

 

[DomainGist]

Since Dan is going away want to test some of my domains with some other options

Have I missed some news here, where is Dan going?

 

[JB Lions]

Have I missed some news here, where is Dan going?

https://www.namepros.com/threads/pa...ng-away-many-dont-seem-to-believe-it.1328399/

 

[Future Sensors]

This development has motivated Doron to develop wonderful new products.

 

[Bravo Mod Team]

Welcome back, @Doron Vermaat!

Glad to see your Ask Pros Anything event. As a friendly reminder, you can open and close this thread yourself next to the Un/Watch button at any time.

Question: It was recently mentioned that Efty was also interested in buying DNWE before it sold recently. Could you share any details about why you were interested, what you wanted to do with it, and what you plan to do in the marketplace category going forward?

Inquiring minds.

 

[equity78]

we launch our Partnership API, which will allow anyone to bring the power of Efty Pay to their app, marketplace, registrar, or website.

That will be the game changer.

 

[Doron Vermaat]

Is Efty moving its business model away from custom marketplaces?

The Efty stores look exactly the same now as they did 4 years ago.... are there any plans to improve these in the near future, or is this part of the business effectively mothballed and have you pivoted towards being a marketplace and payment processor? If so, why, just surrendering to competition?

We did launch a new theme for custom marketplaces as recently as April (I use it for my own custom marketplace at NameRockstar.com) and added more functionality with integrations such as WhatsApp chat in the last couple of years too. Also, CSS allows for quite some freedom to alter things as you can see on BrandForce.com, an Efty-powered marketplace. But I agree with you that development on this feature has fallen behind compared to, for example, our landers. Ultimately, the plan is to bring our Smart Lander technology to the custom marketplace. Once done, this would be a game changer, creating complete creative freedom for those using the feature.

Where is the best place for suggestions. I’ve been a subscriber I think for 6+ years but have been using Dan landers the last few. I searched an old post from 2019 asking about being able to add domains to more than 1 category, front page customization, ability to add extra pages, have to find my old posts think there was more.

Since Dan is going away want to test some of my domains with some other options

Suggestions are fine anywhere public, such as here on NamePros or, for example, Twitter, as well as our official support channel. We keep track of them internally and always look back at the most popular suggestions once we start building out existing or new features.

Question: It was recently mentioned that Efty was also interested in buying DNWE before it sold recently. Could you share any details about why you were interested, what you wanted to do with it, and what you plan to do in the marketplace category going forward?

Inquiring minds.

DNWE was interesting because we could potentially use it to test drive Efty Pay's partner program API. However, I doubt we would have had much time to build upon J&J's legacy because of our rather ambitious roadmap at this moment.

We have big plans in the marketplace category as we know this is where the sale volume ultimately is. Once we have completely rolled out Efty Pay across the Efty Investor product and opened up our partner program API I will be able to share more details on this.

 

[D Haynes]

I was looking at using Efty but feel that the pricing structure for someone like myself with 100-150 names doesn't look very appealing. The jump from a 50 name plan to a 1500 name plan seems quite big and leaves us in a no man's land.

 

[bmugford]

We have a phased rollout strategy with Efty Pay, designed to progressively introduce new features while actively incorporating feedback from our community of sellers and buyers.

Efty Investor is the first integrator for Efty Pay. This means that Efty Investor subscribers can connect their accounts to Efty Pay and create, track, and manage Efty Pay transactions right from within their Efty Investor account. They can soon enable Efty Pay as the Buy-It-Now payment provider for their landing pages and marketplace.

Soon after, we launch our Partnership API, which will allow anyone to bring the power of Efty Pay to their app, marketplace, registrar, or website.

You can find the complete product roadmap for Efty Pay in our latest blog post here.

Some of the recent changes in the domain world make me more willing to explore new options.

Efty Pay sounds very interesting.

What payment methods are currently supported?
It looks like there is a flat 5% fee?

What payout methods are supported?

As far as Efty Investor goes, have you thought about adding a plan that might be more commission based than subscription based?

Right now Efty Investor has plans for 50, 1500, 5000, and 10,000 domains. I feel like a plan around 3000 would make sense to fill the gap. A lot of investors have 1500 - 3000 domains.

Brad

 

[bmugford]

I was looking at using Efty but feel that the pricing structure for someone like myself with 100-150 names doesn't look very appealing. The jump from a 50 name plan to a 1500 name plan seems quite big and leaves us in a no man's land.

Yeah, my comment above was on the gap between 1500 - 5000.

50 - 1500 could probably use a plan to fill the gap also. Many domain investors own several hundred domains, but well under 1,500.

Brad

 

[bmugford]

I see the 5000+ domain plan comes with a White Label option.

Can you give an example of a white label marketplace?

I am also curious what the process looks like from the buyer's perspective both for a BIN and Make Offer domain. Do you have any demonstration of that?

Brad

 

[sg08]

I would prefer to have option with year plan for 200-300 domains.

 

[DomainGist]

I would prefer to have option with year plan for 200-300 domains.

I feel that this is going to become increasingly pertinent with people culling their portfolio sizes and focusing on quality over quantity with the increase in reg/renewal costs.

Perhaps a 500 domain plan is missing.

250, 500, 1500, 5000, Unlimited would be better thresholds.

 

[Doron Vermaat]

I was looking at using Efty but feel that the pricing structure for someone like myself with 100-150 names doesn't look very appealing. The jump from a 50 name plan to a 1500 name plan seems quite big and leaves us in a no man's land.

Right now Efty Investor has plans for 50, 1500, 5000, and 10,000 domains. I feel like a plan around 3000 would make sense to fill the gap. A lot of investors have 1500 - 3000 domains.

I would prefer to have option with year plan for 200-300 domains.

We hear you. We have created a "Starter" plan allowing you to manage up to 500 domain names for $25/month or $240/year. This plan is not (yet) available on the site or within the app, but if you have or create an Efty Investor account, you can email us at [email protected] with the request to use this plan, and we will ensure we upgrade the subscription for you!

 

[Doron Vermaat]

I see the 5000+ domain plan comes with a White Label option.

Can you give an example of a white label marketplace?

I am also curious what the process looks like from the buyer's perspective both for a BIN and Make Offer domain. Do you have any demonstration of that?

Brad

White label means the site's footer does not feature Efty Investor branding, and you can upload your own Favicon.

For examples:

White label: NameRockstar.com
Not white label: DNBX.com

The buyer's perspective on a BIN and Make Offer domain can be different depending on the marketplace theme or the landing page theme the seller is using. Both domain names with BIN and Make Offer can be seen on the sites mentioned above.

When a seller uses our Smart Landers, the number of different options for both BIN and Make Offer is very diverse. Our knowledge base has a demonstration and tutorials for Smart Landers.

 

[Wisher]

Why not just scrap the subscription model altogether? You can attract more domains and make money on the commission.

If Namepros landers end up doing everything Efty can do and they have Efty pay at 5% and their landers are free why do we need Efty subscriptions?

 

[Future Sensors]

Have you seen any noticeable effect from Efty's Play Hard To Get landers? Can you tell us a little about that?

 

[Doron Vermaat]

Efty Pay sounds very interesting.

What payment methods are currently supported?
It looks like there is a flat 5% fee?

What payout methods are supported?

As far as Efty Investor goes, have you thought about adding a plan that might be more commission based than subscription based?

We are live with a phased rollout strategy designed to progressively introduce new features while actively incorporating feedback from our global community of sellers and buyers. This means “Bring Your Sale” is available for Efty Investor subscribers. If you have an active Efty Investor subscription, you can sign up, create your Efty Pay account, and initiate a transaction by importing a negotiated lead today.

• In this first phase of our rollout, we support buyer payments via Wire transfers.
• Successful sales are processed at an introductory commission percentage of only 3.5%
• Efty Pay supports transactions in USD, EUR, and GBP.

We will soon add credit card payments and roll out the roadmap, as shown in this blog post.

Why not just scrap the subscription model altogether? You can attract more domains and make money on the commission.

If Namepros landers end up doing everything Efty can do and they have Efty pay at 5% and their landers are free why do we need Efty subscriptions?

Efty Investor offers much value beyond just landing pages and a marketplace. It's why we have been around for over a decade with thousands of paying subscribers. From a customer service perspective, it has also been nice to have paying customers only. That said, there's a lot of truth in your comment, and with Efty Pay being rolled out, there will be many changes on the horizon for Efty and the different products we offer.

Have you seen any noticeable effect from Efty's Play Hard To Get landers? Can you tell us a little about that?

These were hacked together over the weekend as a bit of a joke, but the templates remain popular today with investors who do not want to display an obvious "For Sale" landing page on their domains.