sales Input sought - How has last month been in sales and queries?

[Bob Hawkes]

Hi NamePros friends,

I am working on an article on statistical trends due to the pandemic. I am not yet 100% sure whether I will find any clear enough trends to publish it at NamePros, but if I do I would also like to include commentary from domain investors as part of the article.

Therefore, if you would be so kind, please add in replies to this post any information or comments that you are willing to share publicly. By posting here I am assuming that you are fine with me quoting you in the article, with attribution of course.

1. Have you seen any significant changes in number of offers, sales or inquiries during the past month?
2. On the sales front, have you seen changes in the types of domain names that are getting traffic or inquiries, either in terms of price level or niche?
3. If you do parking, have you noted any change in parking revenue of late? (e.g. more people on Internet, has it meant more visits to parking sites and clicks).

While I will not be able to include all comments, I really appreciate all who take the time to respond.

Sincerely,

Bob

 

[Pay.My.id]

Thanks for your reply!

To make sure I understand, you are saying more than half are now selecting payment by installments, and that is a change from before?

Bob

Yes Bob , I usually close every the sale via BIN

 

[NickB]

March is historically a busier month for me so I compared the last 45 days to the prior year.

Overall 54% less names sold, but a 174% increase in revenue. With my big sale removed, it is still an 8% increase over last year's revenue during the same period.

Show attachment 150928

I set all my minimum offers pretty high so I've gotten zero or close to zero inquiries, but that is normal.

Thanks for sharing - great transparency......

 

[alcy]

I've only been recording net revenue on my sales spreadsheet (after deducting commission, transfer fees, escrow fees etc., gross sales numbers below are estimates.). I will start to record gross sales from now on. The majority of my sales are BIN, very few payment plans from time to time.

There are about 7000 names in my portfolio that were acquired before new year.

Sales This year:
Janurary - $35k net, around $40K gross sales, 14 sales
Feburary - $39k net, around $50K gross sales, 17 sales
March - Only did around $10K
April - so far had $20K gross, 6 sales in the first 10 days. I've also declined 2 offers of $1k each (both listed for $2-3k)

Comparing to last year:
Janurary - $32k net, around $38k gross sales, 15 sales
Februrary - $23k net, around $27K gross sales, 10 sales
March - $61k net, over $70K gross sales, 15 sales


Conclusion:
It is clear that the pandemic has affected sales last month, to a pretty serious extent in my case. At least 3-4 sales fell through after agreements. I considered lowering prices on some names in my portfolio due to the situation, but I decided not to at the end. In fact, as I was going through my portfolio, I increased prices on my premium names.

I wanted to observe for another 2 months or so, as I believed there was a shock factor in play, and I was hoping that the market will bounce back gradually if not a V shape recovery - when people get more or less used to the situation.

So far, judging from the sales this month, I think I was right. However, it might be too early to come to any firm conclusion.

Industry wise, there hasn't been any noticeable difference for me. I invest in industries I love and/or know about, mostly technology, food, fashion, startup, travel, finance, hospitality

The industries for sales this month are exactly those: fashion, finance, technology

I do not monitor my traffic much, nor do I earn any parking revenue, so I'm no help on those.

Hopefully these data can be of some help for your research.

great sales.. tons of domainers sell in a year what you sell in a monht.

i'd like to ask what kind of portofolio you hold to achieve such results? for instance, avg cost price of your domains, are they old quality domains or on the cheaper expired or closeout or handreg range?

what else do you think in your view would be important info to share about yoru folio or your sale strategies, that could in your view help others achieve similar results to yours?

do your net numbers above take into account acquisition costs as well? sorry but you did not mention acquisition costs in the brackets there among commisions, escrow etc.

many thanks!

 

[biggie]

Hi

if,
1% is floor str
then I've already met that.

and,
that 1% str was greater than, the cost to renew portfolio

and
with the few monthly $ from ppc...
the need to sell to sustain, is removed



still, I look at sales/earnings over span of time, that is larger than a snapshot of a few months.
so, whether I had sold any names or received any inquiries to date, it wouldn't be notation for this pandemic.
as one could sell a domain in July or September, that would wash this point away.



imo...

 

[Josytal]

Below is self-explanatory sales history trend from Namebio.
Jan 19, 2020 thru April 19, 2020.

hope it helps.

 

[WINNA]

Inbound offers have increased at CoronaNames.com

 

[alcy]

I bought around 5000-6000 in 2016/17, then added another bit more than 1000 in 2018-2019. So I had around 7000 names for the past couple of years.

I just added a couple thousand more names this year as I decided to scale my business and portfolio for the coming year, am also in the process of rebuilding my portfolio site.

I didn't have a a lucky big sale or anything...I've been an entrepreneur for quite some time, so I came into domaining with initial capital. I started investing in domains after selling my previous company.

I also didn't just dump half a million dollars in domains and hope for the best. I started investing with maybe high 4 figure-low 5 figure, and when I figured out what I was doing (by endless amount of hard work), I scaled up - and scaled up as fast as I possibly could.

I have yet to sell my biggest purchases yet, but I see them as long term investments, separate from the main portfolio.

And now let's get the thread back on Bob's topic haha.

yes. I meant in general.. that money makes money.... so im sure there were cases of domainers investing 100k and selling for 500k or so.. so that helps but I do hope your couple of 100k worth names will do just that for you as well in future! all the best and yes, lets' not make Bob mad now (joke... I know Bob never gets mad). cheers.

 

[brandsly]

great sales, where do you make most of the sales? and how do you sort for nmaes? auctions or mostly handreg?
Thanks for your input

Thanks. Please refer to the posts followed by that post in the same thread.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thank you so much for your detailed information just shared, @BrandableDomain So for you March was definitely not a down month in terms of dollar volume.

From what others have said, both in this thread and in other ways, I think the experience you describe below is fairly common. Perhaps with more time unscheduled, there does seem to be more browsing of domain names, and even initial offers, but as you say hesitancy in closing.

What doesn’t seem to reconcile is the fact that I seem to be getting just as many leads in my Uniregistry Market account as usual, or maybe more, but buyers seem to be suddenly more hesitant or something.

I have heard (various ways) of a number of experienced successful domain investors doing this - lowering prices somewhat at low end, but not at all at upper end. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over a longer time period, and supposedly get reflected in sales statistics. The question of pricing that leads to the best product of sell-through rate times net price is important but hard to determine.

In terms of strategy, I have been lowering prices on many of my lower value domains since the middle of last year, whenever I’ve found some spare time. I didn’t change prices on many high value names either up or down.

Thanks again for a really detailed response that will help us all, and best wishes for continued success.

Bob

 

[namemarket]

Thanks for the info Bob. The charts confirm we are in a major bear market for domains. If you look at the charts like you are doing stock market technical analysis it's real bearish looking. i.e. since its Oct high there's a series of lower major highs, and we are down 2/3 from high levels and under old support levels.

That helps explain (at least to a degree) why my sales and inquiries are down big time. In fact, they started trending down a few years ago.

After making a lot of mistakes in domains for a long time at least I finally did the best thing by trimming my portfolio over past several years from over 3,000 to about 1,200 last year, down to its current level of a bit over 300 now marked auto-renew, and even that short list is being reviewed.

P.S. This trend is not necessarily related to only coronavirus but has been underway for a long time.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

but average final close on installment (60%) , 40 % on BIN

Thanks for your reply!

To make sure I understand, you are saying more than half are now selecting payment by installments, and that is a change from before?

Bob

 

[F33333]

Short and sweet! Inquiries/sales about the same. More liquidation sales. Increased visitors to landing pages but no increased sales as of yet!

Cheers

 

[ResoluteDomains]

Inquiries are up - sales flat.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thank you so much everyone who took the time to respond.

I have just now posted the NamePros Blog article. So while too late to include additional comments in the article, you can of course at any time share your reflections in this thread.

Thanks again. It shows the power of the NamePros community that by combining our many experiences we can get a multifaceted view on a question.

Stay safe and I hope that all is well with each of your.

Sincerely,

Bob

 

[BrandableDomain]

Thank you so much for your detailed information just shared, @BrandableDomain So for you March was definitely not a down month in terms of dollar volume.

Yes, March was one of my best months ever, thanks to my outlier sale of one of my best domains for $25,000. But if you look more closely, all the big sales were in the first half of the month. So while it is too soon to draw conclusions, the second half of March (and April so far) does seem to foretell a possible declining trend.

I love your later comment which should be the foundation of a post in itself if it hasn’t already been covered by someone:

"The question of pricing that leads to the best product of sell-through rate times net price is important but hard to determine."

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thanks for posting @Josytal. Should the low average sales of last week persist for a few more weeks, seem strong evidence of an April decline. If you look back a bit further, it seems to me any other change is within normal variation, however.

The problem with weekly average is it can be driven down by two things:

• The average sales prices are really going down.
• The retail prices are not changing, but there are more wholesale transactions taking place within price range covered and that pulls average price down (or they are changing in price).

The top graph below looks at $400+ sales only. I would conclude no trend except perhaps last week or so in April. The graph below that is for the same period, and all TLDs still, but now for all transactions $100+. That graph indicates a general downward trend from November last year, but if you go back further, maybe about same as recently. Note that the vertical scale is different on the two graphs.

The difference between these two graphs suggests to me that it is the wholesale end of market that is driving the change in average weekly sales price.

Bob

PS In case wondering why I did not do full year, once you get to the voice sale it so messes up scaling that the graphs are impossible to interpret.

• 

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thanks to those who have already responded, and hope many more will leave their input as well.

If you feel that the size of your portfolio is such that in one month you can't really conclude anything, i am still interested in your perceptions of what is probably happening in the market.

Thanks in advance,

Bob

 

[alcy]

1. No feb and march were same for me
2. well the tourism niche got the strongest hit, I saw an increase in health insurance niche.
3. parking traffic went globally up and it is still globally up. revenues during the first 15 days of March was pretty bad, then i had an explosion and I was able to come back to my usual average. April is starting bad and worse than first 15 days of March on revenues average..

which parking company did u have this explosion on? Ty

 

[mickey-jay]

Thanks @alcy . I’m still in the process of writing that long post about my portfolio/sales stats/domaining journey, which I’ve mentioned in other threads before. It will just take me some time as it’s a lot of information...starting from digging through my emails and finding gross sale numbers for hundreds of names haha.

Here I will do my best to answer your questions, but I will give more details in a future post.

My portfolio is a mixed pot from all kinds of sources. Many people on the forum remember me joining the forum in 2016 and was buying domains all over the place.

I started very late and I wanted to build a decent sized portfolio as fast I as I possibly could, so I bought from all the sources I could think of - all the auction platforms, the forum, private acquisitions, dropcatching, marketplaces etc. So most of my portfolio is from the aftermarket.

I did some handreg in the very beginning, but most of them were dropped after the first year. Now that I have a lot more experience, I actually started to handreg some here and there again, especially for emerging technologies. But hand reg is still only a very small percentage of my portfolio. I love love good aged keyword domains, but just as much as I love newer trendy startup-y names. I only focus on brandables and what I can envision being names of new startups, and I think that is very important - being able to see uses for every name you buy. In fact, I get many new business ideas from the names I buy, so much so that I intentionally price some names higher just so I don’t sell them too fast, hoping to develop them myself one day when I have time.

My overall acquisition cost is around $1xx, however, top 2 names I own already cost around $100K, and I've bought quite a bit of liquid names averaging $xxxx each. Taken those out, average acquisition cost for rest of the names would be $xx. I've definitely overpaid for a lot of names in auctions given the current state of the aftermarket, but I've balanced those cost out by finding names that slip under the radar - more on that in the future post.

The net sales from the post above include the acquisition costs, but acquisition costs are pretty much negligible for the most part. Most of the time, acquisition costs are 2-3% of the sales price, in exceptional cases, it could be 5-10% of sales price for bigger sales. Why 2-3%? Because that’s my annual sell through rate, and I always try to get all my new investments back in a year.

I don’t have any special sales strategy. I list all names on Afternic/Sedo and point them to Dan. Everything has BIN prices. I used to have my own landing pages, but had to switch to Dan because of an international relocation and I was no longer able to accept credit card payments. It worked out quite well as I know that I'm not very good at negotiation haha. Nowadays, Afternic brokers and Dan handle most of the inquiries. Majority of the names are just sold at the listed BIN prices.

As I mentioned in other posts before, I believe good names sell themselves. I have a few hundred names listed on various marketplaces, but I see them more as learning experiences. I still like to have full control over my portfolio.

Very Impressive journey. I can't wait to read the long post about your domaining journey.
If i may ask what's your yearly profit range like after deducting renewal cost.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thanks for sharing your experience, @biggie and congratulations on already by this point in the year doing enough sales to cover your renewals. I agree entirely with your caution that none off us should feel that very short term results, on small number statistics, are necessarily meaningful.

still, I look at sales/earnings over span of time, that is larger than a snapshot of a few months.

Thanks again, and best wishes for continued success during 2020 and beyond.

Bob

 

[biggie]

I agree entirely with your caution that none off us should feel that very short term results, on small number statistics, are necesly meaningful.

Hi

with that caution in mind...

it should be noted that,
any sales stat can be meaningful, to any seller, any time, and at their discretion.

i'm not trying to take nobody's joy or toss salt, on "what, means what," to who.

my post, reflects specifically, how I look at my sales.
which is in contrast, with respect... to title of this thread,

let me elaborate:
as years pass, some sellers may have more sales at any given time of the year than others,
or had more sales last year than 3 years prior, vice-versa, etc..
after a decade or so, it becomes more about the years you put in, and the "amounts the domains sold for".

and to that extent, "sold price" is more meaningful, in retrospect, than which month of the year it sold.
just saying....

imo..

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I love your later comment which should be the foundation of a post in itself if it hasn’t already been covered by someone:

"The question of pricing that leads to the best product of sell-through rate times net price is important but hard to determine."

Thank you @BrandableDomain , and I agree.

I have thought about the question, almost from my first months in semi-serious domaining, but it is of course impossible to answer precisely, and difficult to even estimate. The debate we saw earlier in the whether to shoot the moon, or not, in pricing is related. But even more simply than that, if I have say a domain name that many investors would price at $5000, if I price it at $10,000, would I still get at least half as many sales, since in many cases the prospective owner really wants that specific name? Or if I price it at $2500, will I get twice as many?

I do hope to put together a post on just that question, not too long in future. Have come up with a couple of semi-quantitative ways to possibly investigate it, and other areas of sales / consumer behaviour have some ideas to offer I presume (have not researched that part yet).

A really interesting question more directly related to the topic of this thread is whether that changes during stressed economic times. That is, do potential buyers become more price conscious at times like this. It seems some smart domain investors guess that they do, and have done some repricing at the lower end in their portfolios.

Thanks again for your response.

Bob

 

[damance]

outbound
0 sales
0 offers

 

[Josytal]

Thanks for posting @Josytal. Should the low average sales of last week persist for a few more weeks, seem strong evidence of an April decline. If you look back a bit further, it seems to me any other change is within normal variation, however.

The problem with weekly average is it can be driven down by two things:

• The average sales prices are really going down.
• The retail prices are not changing, but there are more wholesale transactions taking place within price range covered and that pulls average price down (or they are changing in price).

The top graph below looks at $400+ sales only. I would conclude no trend except perhaps last week or so in April. The graph below that is for the same period, and all TLDs still, but now for all transactions $100+. That graph indicates a general downward trend from November last year, but if you go back further, maybe about same as recently. Note that the vertical scale is different on the two graphs.

The difference between these two graphs suggests to me that it is the wholesale end of market that is driving the change in average weekly sales price.

Bob

PS In case wondering why I did not do full year, once you get to the voice sale it so messes up scaling that the graphs are impossible to interpret.

While we may not be 100% certain of the full impact of downward trend of average sales prices on volume of successful transactions, one thing is glaringly clear:

The trend is dealing a big blow to overall income of retail Marketplaces - since they mostly work on commission bases.

Many domainers are cutting down asking prices to adjust to the new market realities, the "domain glut". Whether or not this strategy is sustainable, only time can tell.

And the big guns are seizing the opportunity.
So, it'll be logical to hypothesize further increase in completed sales at the wholesale end of market, which is more or less elastic.

 

[alcy]

Thanks @alcy . I’m still in the process of writing that long post about my portfolio/sales stats/domaining journey, which I’ve mentioned in other threads before. It will just take me some time as it’s a lot of information...starting from digging through my emails and finding gross sale numbers for hundreds of names haha.

Here I will do my best to answer your questions, but I will give more details in a future post.

My portfolio is a mixed pot from all kinds of sources. Many people on the forum remember me joining the forum in 2016 and was buying domains all over the place.

I started very late and I wanted to build a decent sized portfolio as fast I as I possibly could, so I bought from all the sources I could think of - all the auction platforms, the forum, private acquisitions, dropcatching, marketplaces etc. So most of my portfolio is from the aftermarket.

I did some handreg in the very beginning, but most of them were dropped after the first year. Now that I have a lot more experience, I actually started to handreg some here and there again, especially for emerging technologies. But hand reg is still only a very small percentage of my portfolio. I love love good aged keyword domains, but just as much as I love newer trendy startup-y names. I only focus on brandables and what I can envision being names of new startups, and I think that is very important - being able to see uses for every name you buy. In fact, I get many new business ideas from the names I buy, so much so that I intentionally price some names higher just so I don’t sell them too fast, hoping to develop them myself one day when I have time.

My overall acquisition cost is around $1xx, however, top 2 names I own already cost around $100K, and I've bought quite a bit of liquid names averaging $xxxx each. Taken those out, average acquisition cost for rest of the names would be $xx. I've definitely overpaid for a lot of names in auctions given the current state of the aftermarket, but I've balanced those cost out by finding names that slip under the radar - more on that in the future post.

The net sales from the post above includes the acquisition costs, but acquisition costs are pretty much negligible for the most part. Most of the time, acquisition costs are 2-3% of sales prices, in exceptional cases, it could be 5-10% of sales prices for bigger sales. Why 2-3%? Because that’s my annual sell through rate, and I always try to get all my new investments back in a year.

I don’t have any special sales strategy. I list all names on Afternic/Sedo and point them to Dan. Everything has BIN prices. I used to have my own landing pages, but had to switch to Dan because of an international relocation and I was no longer able to accept credit card payments. It worked out quite well as I know that I'm not very good at negotiation haha. Nowadays, Afternic brokers and Dan handle most of the inquiries. Majority of the names are just sold at the listed BIN prices.

As I mentioned in other posts before, I believe good names sell themselves. I have a few hundred names listed on various marketplaces, but I see them more as learning experiences. I still like to have full control over my portfolio.

thanks for this great info. look forward to yoru future thread on this.

now that you mention it, I joined around same time as you, but I think your name rings a bell as somebody who was very active selling and buying a lot of names. but I guess in the end it paidoff and you got the hang of things.

sorry if you already said this before, but one final question i'd like to ask for now is what size folio you hold roughly.. or did you say few 100s of names in total? many thanks again and its inspiring to see your sales. as I Said, most domainers make in a year what you make in a month so its impressive. but.. usually also money makes money... so if some domainers are able to afford buying a domain for say 100k... only to resell it for 500k or 1 million, then there is already your big head start in domaining.

cheers