Namerific vs Brandbucket vs Brandroot vs others

[muttus]

Hi NPs,

I would like to start discussion to get as much knowledge about existing marketplaces in to one nice thread. I know there are specific threads for each marketplace but I think it is good to compare them to get good picture. I have been submitting domains to both Namerific and Brandbucket till now and had few accepted in BB.

These are my thoughts please feel free to contest them.

Namerific
+ Faster reply 2-3 weeks
+ Free to list
+ More focused on 2 words and descriptive
+ Seller chooses the price
+ You can still have the for sale in other places

- Rejection rate?
- Outreach ?
- Size of database? - I am worried that if you have so many names one more will just get lost, nobody wants to go through more then couple dozen names

Brandbucket
+ Free to list after voting
+ Focus on word hacks and short pronounceable names without meaning
+ Probably most visible and marketed
+ Search options?

- Long waiting period 4+ weeks
- Require exclusivity
- Size of database? - I am worried that if you have so many names one more will just get lost, nobody wants to go through more then couple dozen names

Brandroot - please submit your ideas


Others - please submit you ideas


Now to the questions.
Where do you place you brandables?

Where do you think is highest chance to sell and why?

What is your average success rate for submission and sale?

Do you submit your brandables according to main focus of the marketplace?

Bad vs good experience?

Are there any official sales numbers for each marketplace?

 

[Domainerr]

Namerific:
Listed 8 Domain names and zero sales so far.
conversion rate : Nil ( Listed only 8 domains )
Customer Support: Excellent
Logo: Good

Brandroot:
Listed 13 Domains and Sold 1 domain name for low xxxx.
Conversion rate : 7.6%
Customer Support: Excellent
Logo: Excellent

BrandBucket:
Listed 15 domain names and sold 4 domains in xxxx range.
Conversion rate: 26.6%
Customer Support: Good
Logo: Good

YourBrand:
Listed 8 Domain names and zero sales.
Conversion rate: Nil
Customer Support: Good
Logo : Good

 

[Keith DeBoer]

Namerific is a nonexlusive marketplace that's always offered FREE listing fee's for premium domains like 4Ls, and other quality brandables. They charge for second tier domains that they estimate may need a little extra help selling.

Namerific 'non-exclusive'? That's funny. My acceptance rate at Namerific was about 3% and I had to wait as long as a month or more to get my domains reviewed. I don't call that non-exclusive.

Regarding the listing fee you can spin it any way you want but Namerific has listing fees. More than half my accepted domains at Namerific required a listing fee for publication. Yea they have special weird deals for free listings but they were inconsistent and whimsical. Personally I'd rather deal with a marketplace that doesn't waffle back and forth on their fees on a whim. I like to know where I stand and BB makes all their policies and procedures clear in their seller agreement and seller FAQ.

 

[uBrandable]

Hi everyone,

We would like to add ourselves to the list of existing brandable marketplaces.

What other marketplace pays you, the seller, to list your domain(s)?

What makes uBrandable unique:

• We pay sellers $10 for every name that is approved and listed with us.
• We only take 5% of the final sale price and let you keep the remaining 95%.
• We will send you a copy of the escrow.com invoice so you can see the price your domain sold for.
• We only sell quality brandable .com names.
  
• Obviously, there are no listing fees.
  
• We will feature and promote your brand name on our homepage for free.

 

[Hypersot]

I'm definitely not the best to talk about brandables since I only invest a very small amount of my earnings on them, but here it is anyway:

In about a year I started regging brandable names I have only sold three and none were sold by the marketplaces you mentioned, all three names were actually rejected by them.

2 of them got sold when the buyer approached me and 1 via a 'normal' make-offer listing on GoDaddy.

The earnings I got were just a bit less than what I'd get by selling via any of the Brand marketplaces. Note that I didn't have to pay anyone a 30% commission, so all the money earned got in my pocket (except the 10% commission to GoDaddy)

The 20 or so names I have on the Brand markeplaces haven't been sold yet and a lot of them are due for renewal.

As I said, not exactly what you asked for, but I thought I should share my experience.

 

[Candace]

(Venting)

My experience with

BB: I don't like the 30% commission or the exclusivity or the $10 listing fee, but I've had nothing but quick and great customer service from them. They answer emails relatively quickly and they are nothing but polite in my experience.

BR: To this day my account hasn't been fully created. I signed up, all info was received, they said they'd get back to me. I waited a couple of weeks (maybe 4 weeks) before they sent me an email letting me know that my account was created. But, when I tried to log in, I got an error message stating that I didn't have an account. Actually in hindsight maybe I do have an account because I was one of those who received about 70 emails from them a couple of weeks ago with other people's account info.

Namerific: I can't with their customer service. I received an email about 4 weeks ago letting me know that there was an offer on the one domain I had with them. After about 2-3 emails back and forth with them, I asked them to accept the offer. Then silence - I heard nothing back for two weeks; no updates, nothing. I sent an email, to which I got no response. Eventually, they contacted me to let me know that the first potential buyer never responded to their invoice, but that there was a second lower offer on the table. Again, after a series of back and forth, I've heard nothing back now for maybe another 10 days to two weeks. Maybe the 2nd buyer walked away as well and that's fine, but I've been trying to call and I've emailed them; they haven't responded. Moreover, they're almost never online, and they apparantly don't pick up the phones.

I'm not sure how BR and Namerific expect to compete with BB if they aren't as helpful or as professional as BB. They both need to get their acts together imo

(End Rant)

 

[Simon Taylor]

If Namerific generated sales then it might be useful. In my experience they generate no sales, and only send low ball offers through. I can only offer my experience with them, and as someone with over 1,000 name listed on the major brandable sites I hope this might be useful to others.

I had four listed for 3 months that were rejected by Bb, had an offer on one that I countered and sold so there is some worth in listing there.
Having said that my names are spread over 3 marketplaces, without access to br.
I submit to one, then the rejected to the next, then the next rejects to the third marketplace.

 

[Simon Taylor]

I have only recently been listing at Namerific however had a good sale back when I only had 5 published.
Was a bb reject too, $2k inc fees.

 

[Chris Hydrick]

I sold another hand reg at br earlier this month. I have had more br sales than bb sales this year. I don't have many domains listed with br, 22 currently, yet I have found some success with them this year. I don't want to mislead anybody. This is simply my experience.

For those who are new to br, and are considering acquiring domains via the reseller market, I caution you to consider the domain itself, and not just the suggested value when making your br reseller domain purchase.

 

[WebInceptions]

OK... I've removed the names. Read from bottom up.


=====
Hello *,

All of our names get published and featured in our newsletter 1 time, and added to the website chronologically by date published. Some may remain there longer that others though as it depends on the queue.

Buyers come to us with a specific budget and industry in mind for their startup and based on the information they provide to us our sales team searches our entire database and offers potential names and links to these searches which include everyones names filtered to these specific needs.

In the past, we have reached out to potential buyers directly, but this has typically only been done with high value domains. With that being said, if you are aware of a possibly interested buyer for one of your domains, we would be happy to reach out on your behalf.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions.

Best, *
========

Hi *-

Thank you for the fast and detailed reply. From what I gather, no marketing or promotion is done at all for my domains – just generalized marketing for your website? That’s the same as Sedo and Afternic – or perhaps I’m missing something here. Are you making calls and pitches to potential buyers? Are you specifically mentioning specific domains for sale in your promotions?

Thanks! *
=========
Hello *,

Thank you for contacting us.

BrandBucket's 2015 sales topped $2.4 million with 801 names sold.That is an average sales price of nearly $3K. However, please keep in mind that we cannot guarantee a specific timeline for each name to sell. Unlike keyword name which have a tangible value, brandable names require the right buyer to come along and fall in love with the name. Though some of our names sell within weeks of being listed, and some take over 2 years. However, we do believe that we can sell your domains of this type faster (and for more money) than any other marketplace out there. You should also remember that the $10 listing fee will last for the entire duration of the listing regardless of the time it takes to sell.

We ask for exclusivity because we have worked hard to build relevant traffic, a strong base of repeat buyers, and we have a large marketing budget for advertising and partner programs. More than any other marketplace we are investing in getting your name sold. We have also seen many times that if a buyer sees a name for sale in more than one place on the web, a level of overall distrust is created and they walk away from purchasing the name at all (since many buyers are new to domain purchases, and they don't quite understand how multiple sites can all have the authority to sell one unique asset.)

Best, *
======
Hi -

I've been in the domain business for nearly 20 years, and thought I would
give you guys a try.

I've been using Sedo and Afternic for years with great success, and they are
worth the 10% - 15% commission. What specifically do you do to attract
buyers that warrants a triple commission plus listing fee plus an
exclusivity agreement?

Regards, *

 

[Domainerr]

Amazing stats Domainerr. That is exactly I and lot of other Domainers were looking for. Congrats on your amazing conversion rate at BB, 26.6% is huge IMHO. How long did it take you to so sell those names? Could you please share how do you choose where to put your brand name?

The Domain names i sold at brandbucket was M/e/d/r/i/n/a, s/c/o/n/s/o,
T/o/u/r/a/l/a and X/o/u/r/a . These Domains i mentioned are sold before 2 years. Yes the conversion rate was huge in 2012-2013. But things changed a lot when Brandbucket expanded the Marketplace. Rest of my Domains get buried on that vast list of Domain names., so i shifted the rest of brandbucket listed domains to brandroot now.

 

[Domainerr]

@Domainerr Haven't heard of YourBrand.com before now. Any further details to share on who they are and how they operate?

Yourbrand.com is operated by StevenKaziyev who is the CEO of Name Pursuit, Inc., a New York-based company that owns thousands of high-quality generic dot coms. Steven was unaware about brandable Domain names marketplaces. It was the founder of Brandbucket, Margot Bushnaq who opened Steven's eyes about the possibility of Brandable domain name sales .

 

[London555]

Hi everyone,

We would like to add ourselves to the list of existing brandable marketplaces.

What other marketplace pays you, the seller, to list your domain(s)?

What makes uBrandable unique:

• We pay sellers $10 for every name that is approved and listed with us.
• We only take 5% of the final sale price and let you keep the remaining 95%.
• We will send you a copy of the escrow.com invoice so you can see the price your domain sold for.
• We only sell quality brandable .com names.
  
• Obviously, there are no listing fees.
  
• We will feature and promote your brand name on our homepage for free.

at least you dont have 23,000 names listed.

 

[equity78]

Hi everyone,

We would like to add ourselves to the list of existing brandable marketplaces.

What other marketplace pays you, the seller, to list your domain(s)?

What makes uBrandable unique:

• We pay sellers $10 for every name that is approved and listed with us.
• We only take 5% of the final sale price and let you keep the remaining 95%.
• We will send you a copy of the escrow.com invoice so you can see the price your domain sold for.
• We only sell quality brandable .com names.
  
• Obviously, there are no listing fees.
  
• We will feature and promote your brand name on our homepage for free.

Are you still paying people to list ?

 

[Brandworthy]

Are you still paying people to list ?

Their site has a handful of names all listed at the same $35,000 price point. E.g. fresda.com for $35,000?

 

[Keith DeBoer]

OK, @Grilled Now I see you meant non-exclusive in that sellers can list their domains at Namerific and also at SEDO at the same time. OK. That's correct and its different from BB and BR. That wasn't clear to me in your original post about publication fees.

My point was that in terms of acceptance and publication Namerific is just as exclusive as any other marketplace.

And yes each marketplace has their own terms of use. We agree to play by those rules when we submit and publish our names on that marketplace. That's how business is done. Every website has a terms of use. Even NamePros. We agree to abide by those rules when we become a member.

Thanks for clarifying your point.

Cheers!

 

[Hypersot]

@Hypersot It's questions like this, that will get others to begin questioning, marketplaces to listen, and industries to change. I certainly have.

Thank you so much for asking these questions. They were by no means stupid questions, and I can't thank you enough for raising these questions. I'm sure Namerific has answers to your questions about what they do for your domains, to the point of commission fee's, and how they reward those who forward their domains to Namerific. If they don't, I'm sure competition can force their hand to adhere to incentivizing their sellers who do. They already provide free listing fee's for premium domains, but this does not mandate your type in traffic.

Thank you. I wish NP got more 'positive' posts like yours, it seems the forum is getting a lot of poison lately.

regarding the brandable markets,
there is actually more to it than what I have asked on that post.
You see, at some point in the past, I started wondering that question, ie. what do the brandable market offer us exactly?

What I did to answer my question was that I 'simulated' the behaviour of someone that starts a company and looks for help in the search engines, just to get a small understanding of how much traffic those markets get.
I didn't get any 'solid' results so I moved even deeper,

I used my 'parking' experience when searching for domains to analyze the traffic of the 3 most well known brandable sites, ie. BR, NR and BB.
One of the first things I did was to get the keywords they tried to rank for and used SEMrush and SearchMetrics to see what I'd get... that was a year+ ago btw.

anyway, I won't go much into the details but all in all I realised that people mostly arrive on those marketplaces by other means than search or social media; maybe word of mouth or traffic from all the other domains that are parked with them.
Surely they couldn't compete with the traffic that the major marketplaces got though (ie. GoDaddy, SEDO, etc.)

That's where I also got another question, ie. what those marketplaces do when a potential buyer lands on them?
The only time I sold a domain with BB I first got their representative asking me if I wanted to sell lower.
I said 'no' and after a few days the domain got sold at the price it was originally set.
I still wonder why I had to answer to get that domain sold at the price I wanted. Wasn't that part of the representative's work? ie. the 30% we're talking about?

anyway, I'm pretty sure there are people with way more knowledge than me who understand how things work.
In my 2+ years in this business I still feel like I'm in my first week -as in totally newbie- so all I can do is wait and get more experience and try to adapt instead of see things negative... that doesn't stop me from still having an opinion though

 

[Abdullah Abdullah]

Absolutely I was asked this same question by another member this morning, so thank you for asking, and allowing me to clarify the dislike. I'm short on time, and have already discussed this via a private conversation earlier this morning.

It's Saturday, and a beautiful day in Minnesota, so allow me to copy and paste an exert of something I wrote earlier today.

Show attachment 31129

**Correction to the screenshot. BrandRoot is exclusive. Namerific is NonExclusive**

I'll be happy to answer any questions when I return from the lakes. :D

Also, I believe you were referring to Namerific in your comment directed towards those marketplace who reject your domain for free listing, but accept your domain for a listing fee. Feel feel to move these posts to the BB vs vs BR vs NR thread if you'd like.

lol I dont know if you explained anything there but it is ok and ahead we move

 

[loredan]

I might be late in the game but Im still trying to understand the seller newsletter I received!
I believe the sell through rate is relatively straightforward regardless of whats written within.
They sold 801 names
They have in average 25,000 names throughout the year
The sell-through rate for BB is 3.2% in average for all sellers within that.
Looking at this rate its fantastic and it makes me wanna return to the platform, coz I will have around 600 names there! Does this mean I might sell 19 names a year with BB? Hell NO!!!

That's a lot of names you had with BB, surprised you haven't made more sales. Have you tried BR or NR (if you don't want to go back to BB)? With 500-600 names you should sell at least 1-2 a month imo...

I don't think Krell sells 400 names a year as you said...it's like 15-20 / month so probably around 200/year but hey, he's got 5000+ listed !

 

[Chris Hydrick]

That's a lot of names you had with BB, surprised you haven't made more sales. Have you tried BR or NR (if you don't want to go back to BB)? With 500-600 names you should sell at least 1-2 a month imo...

BrandRoot is exclusive just like BrandBucket so @bazabizo wouldn't be able to broker his own domains without incurring a 30% fee as suggested.

Namerific is the only nonexlusive brandable marketplace that will allow sellers to list, and broker their own domains. Granted, they don't accept domains simply because they're BB/BR invested or approved, they will accept domains without charging a listing fee if you have premium domains and/or provide a high quality logo with your domain.

 

[Chris Hydrick]

Interview with Mike Navarini,

An interview with Mike Navarini Namerific.com. Mike gives us some insight into why Namerific is better than their competitors and tells us the top sale so far on Namerific for 2016. 1) How long have you been buying and selling brandable names and how did you get involved with Namerific ? I bought my first domain as a teenager, and have been collecting them ever since. I met my co-founder, Zane … [Read more...]

Thank you Ray, and Mike for taking the time to do this game changing interview... HERE

Question #3:

 

[Simon Taylor]

Personally I'm a strong believer in not having all your eggs in one basket.
Why not spread domains amongst all markets, I've noticed each has their slants on names they accept I find quite often bb names aren't accepted at nr and vice versa.

 

[WebInceptions]

This is one of those discussion threads that I just don't understand.

Why is no one discussing whether or not any of these 3 brokers actually do their job and sell domain names? Isn't that the goal?

Not sure why these discussions are always just about company philosophy, listing fees, etc... I really don't care about those things, if any of these companies actually SELL then I'll happily pay the fees. If not, I don't care about the other details.

So... what is the success rate of any of these companies? If I give them each 10 different domain names for 1 year, what are the odds at each that I'll sell half of them?

 

[WebInceptions]

For 30%, I would expect proactive marketing for each domain name, so I would want to be able to log in and see an activity log such as:

2016-06-01 3:00pm Agent ___ emailed a prospective buyer at ____ Inc.
2016-06-01 3:10pm Agent ___ called a prospective buyer at ____ Inc.
2016-06-01 4:00pm Agent ___ received returned call from ____ Inc., they will be making an offer on Monday
2016-06-01 4:30pm Agent ___ placed ad on 1,000 member photography newsletter.

 

[WebInceptions]

I emailed BrandBucket this week and asked what they do for sellers, beyond what is done by Sedo and Afternic. To summarize the response -- nothing. They just put a logo on it and charge a LOT more.