New Namesilo Marketplace

[cocaseco]

Just saw this and the 7.5% commissions stood out!. Nice to have another option.

https://www.namesilo.com/Support/Marketplace

 

[namesilo]

Hi Everyone. We have just made a number of updates to our Marketplace that we thought you might be interested in knowing. Here are the highlights:

• Payment plans now available!
  • Set maximum number of months for payment plan
  • Set minimum down payment
  • Buyers receive the domain immediately after issuing the down payment
  • Buyers can prepay for their installment payments or get billed automatically. If more than 5 payments are missed, the domain is returned to you and you keep any earned payouts.
  • Add payment plan support at any time - even after bids/offers have been made. This means you can update any of your existing sales to offer a payment plan.
• New Marketplace rules for payment methods accepted to make purchasing your domains easier for Buyers!
  • Any sale or payment plan payment under $500 no longer requires a verified method of payment
  • Our minimum price to require a wire transfer was raised from $1,000 to $5,000
• AliPay, the most popular online payment processor in China, can now be used for Marketplace sales
• You can now receive payouts immediately if the Buyer pays via AliPay, Bitcoin or wire transfer. Other payment methods still require a 7-day waiting period to receive your payouts.

We hope these updates help you sell your domains by offering more options for your Buyers, easier payments for sales and faster payouts for you! As always, you can find out more about our Marketplace at https://www.namesilo.com/Support/Marketplace.

 

[namesilo]

We made the post above in early November 2016. At that time (about 8 months ago), we were very happy to see momentum starting to build for our Marketplace. As noted, at the time of that post, we had generated a total of $145,000 of domain sales in the first full year of our Marketplace. I am very pleased to report some more recent results....

In the first half of 2016, we have generated over $450,000 of sales, with our largest 2 months of Marketplace revenue happening in the last 2 months in a row.... June 2017 alone saw $116,190 in sales!

Many of the ratios listed from our November 2016 post above are still holding regarding the ratio of sale types (auction versus offer/counter offer). A few other pieces of data from just the first half of 2017:

Note that Offer/Counter-offer sale means a pure BIN sale in many cases

• $450,967.35 in total sales revenue

• $399,453.20 sold via Offer/Counter-offer sale

• $51,514.15 sold via Auction sale

• 1,083 domains have been sold

• 830 via Offer/Counter-offer sale

• 253 via Auction sale

• $416.40 average sale price

• $33,250 largest Offer/Counter-offer sale

• $10,100 largest Auction sale

• 71 sales setup with a payment plant

• 1 Buyer charge back

• Average payout in 6.4 days

We are very encouraged by this growth with our Marketplace and we would like to thank many NP members on this thread and others for their very helpful and well-thought out ideas for improvement. We remain committed to offering a good option for your domain sales and continuing to enhance our offering.

Thanks everyone!

Hi Everyone,

A few people have requested some updated numbers from our Marketplace, so here goes...

We made the post above on July 3, 2017. At that time we had just about $600,000 in revenue from sales on our Marketplace covering the period from our Marketplace launch in late 2015 through July 3, 2017.

In the nearly 8 months since then, we have generated $1,260,886 of Marketplace revenue! You can really see the momentum looking at these numbers:

• In the first 20 months of our Marketplace we had ~$600,000 of sales
• In the 8 months since, we have had over $1,250,000 of sales!

To continue with the previously-provided breakdowns, since July 3, 2017:

Note that Offer/Counter-offer sale means a pure BIN sale in many cases

• $1,260,886 in total sales revenue
  • $1,245,412 sold via Offer/Counter-offer (BIN) sale
    
  • $15,474 sold via Auction sale
    
• 1,827 domains have been sold
  • 1,688 sold via Offer/Counter-offer (BIN) sale
  • 139 sold via Auction sale
    
• $690 average sale price
• $20,000 largest Offer/Counter-offer (BIN) sale (2 domains)
• $2,470 largest Auction sale
• 222 sales setup with a payment plan (12%).
• Of the 1,605 sales that occurred without a payment plan, 780 (48.5%) had a payment plan as an option.
• 2 Buyer charge backs
• Average payout in 5.8 days

A few other data points that were requested (thanks to @tonyk2000):

• Of the 222 payment plans, 135 (60%) opted for the longest payment plan duration offered
• There is no clear correlation between geo location and propensity to establish payment plans
• Of the 222 payment plans that were setup, 14 (6%) did not complete and the domain was returned to the owner. Of those, 5 of the 14 resulted in the buyer contacting us to report a problem with their selected payment method and us contacting the seller to inform them of the problem o see the domain relisted at the amount of the outstanding payment. In all of these 5 cases, the buyer purchased the domain again at full ask.
• Of the 222 sales setup with a payment plan, they broke down in the following ranges:
  • $10 - $100: 14
  • $100 - $500: 44
  • $500 - $1,000: 71
  • $1,000 - $2,000: 37
  • $2,000 - $5,000: 34
  • $5,000+: 22

We hope this data helps, and we would once again like to thank everyone on NamePros for all of the feedback, suggestions and constructive criticism that we have received. We clicked through a lot of this thread (and others) to find the data points people were most interested in, and it brought back a lot of the things we had worked on over the last few years of enhancing our Marketplace... based very noticeably upon the feedback we have received here!

 

[Arca]

Just wanted to share a "trick" I've been using to slightly increase my NS marketplace turnover. Sometimes I'm not able to reach a price agreement with a prospective buyer during negotiations, and as a result, not able to turn the offer into a sale. What can be very frustrating in these situations is that I often have further price flexibility on the domain. But for some reason a lot of end-users take my first counter offer as my final and lowest offer, and if they think it's too high they simply disappear rather than make a lower counter-offer. They could have made a lower counter-offer, and I would have accepted it a lot of the time, but instead they choose to end negotiations rather than counter-offering.

Personally, whenever I get an inbound offer I always prefer to sell at the lowest price I can accept, rather than not make a sale at all and hold out for a more ideal price from another buyer. Especially if it's an average quality domain. As every domain investor knows, it often takes years before another interested buyer comes along, and in some cases another buyer may never materialize again. So I always prefer to sell if I have the chance to make a decent profit at a price I can live with, rather than hold out for the potential of a higher return years down the line.

In these situations, after negotiations have ended but where I still had pricing flexibility, I usually delete the domain listing, and then list it again at the lowest price I am willing to accept. The namesilo system will then send the person who made the offer an email telling them the domain has been listed for sale again. Sometimes the buyer returns to check out the listing again, and upon discovering that the price has been lowered and is now close to or within their budget range they proceed to buy the domain. This only works occasionally, but the fact that it works at all makes it a nice last ditch effort to turn an inbound offer into a sale in some situations where the buyer is close to or within the range you are willing to sell the domain for. I find this to be most effective if I list the domain at a price very close to the buyer's last/final offer. Say if buyer came up to $1000, and that's a price I would have been happy to sell the name for, I would then list the domain again in the $1000-1250 range, and sometimes the buyer returns to buy it. This method is not going to work most of the time, but in some situations where you feel like the buyer might have bought the domain if only they had known your lowest/floor price, it can be a helpful technique to make a sale that would otherwise not have happened.

 

[namesilo]

Just a quick update on our Marketplace as it continues to expand. Our data has just been compiled for last month (March 2017) and we had another in a line of record months!

For March 2017:

• 130 sales
• 18 sales setup using a payment plan
  
• $106,500 of sales revenue
• Largest sale: $12,500 (2 others over $10,000)

This was the 14th month out of the last 16 that has seen increased total sales and sales revenue compared to the prior month so we are very happy with the momentum. We are continuing to work on even more updates to our Marketplace (including some of the suggestions shared in this thread) and we are also working on new strategies to potentially offer even lower commissions. More on this in the coming weeks.

Thanks again to everyone on NP that is already using our Marketplace, and to those who have expressed interest in learning more.

 

[namesilo]

We should be able to get this info, but may take a day or 2

We will reply back here once we get the data together.

Ok - we were able to get through the data you requested....

Of the 71 sales that used a payment plan, they broke down in the following ranges:

• $10-$100: 4
• $100-$500: 14
• $500-$1,000: 25
• $1,000-$2,000: 15
• $2,000-$5,000: 9
• $5,000+: 4

The ratios for sales using payment plans versus not using payment plans is certainly higher as the dollar amount increases. Of course, we need to keep in mind that most sales in our platform for the given time range were between $200-$1,000. Over time, we have trended with higher sales prices and we expect that to continue in large part due to the lowering of our commission to 3% for sales paid for via wire transfer. In looking at things more closely, the common sense thought that payment plans are utilized more as the sale price increases certainly holds true. However, at the very top of the sales price results, the trend seems to go down. Most of our sales over $7,500 for example were to large enterprise Buyers. They appear much more willing to simply send a wire for the full amount and are not as likely to be persuaded by the option of a payment plan, or even drawn-out negotiations. We will do our best to remember to post our results a few times per year so that we can all watch these trends. For now, my personal feeling is that sales between $1k-$5k benefit the most from the option for a payment plan as buyers are more price-sensitive and likely don't have the same access to capital for large one-time payments as those in higher price ranges. Of course, this is a general statement and there are always exceptions.

Hope this has helped

 

[namesilo]

We just added 2 more updates related to the landing page options:

• You can now upload your own images to use for the background of landing pages that support background images. You can store an unlimited number of images in your library and select to use them on a per-sale basis, or applied in bulk.
  
  
• We are now including some geo location data in emails you receive when people fill out the contact form on applicable landing pages. This data includes the country, state/province and city of the person who submitted the form based on their IP address.

We are very excited about all of the new landing page choices, configuration options and functionality that we've added in the last few weeks. Our goal is to help you sell your domains by giving you the most options possible for the display and content of your landing pages and sales configurations. We are always interested in hearing your ideas for ways we can improve so don't be shy with requests/suggestions

We can't promise that we will be able to do everything, but the more we know about what you'd like to see, the better we can continue improving.

 

[namesilo]

Hi Everyone. A few updates we wanted to share...

First, we just released another new landing page template! This new template is a responsive design that is our first template to include an optional background image.You can see the new template on the bottom of this page: https://www.namesilo.com/Support/Marketplace . The template allows a choice of 6 different background images (or none at all) and is entirely backward-compatible with our other templates so feel free to change any existing sales to using the new template if you want to try it out.

Also, we are very pleased to report that the new template we announced 2 weeks ago has been quite successful. That template is our only one (currently) that has an on-page contact form. There have been over 50 forms filled out to-date (not including tests) and there have been 5 sales already!

Hope you enjoy and more to come!

 

[EmotiveDomains]

One thing myself, and I imagine most domainers have always wanted was a one stop shop where you can, register, sell and direct to sales landing pages from, that doesn't charge crazy prices or demand massive commission.

Combined with the fact you're on both the Afternic Premium and SedoMLS networks, I think NameSilo is quickly becoming the all-in-one solution for domainers.

Hopefully as more domainers move their portfolios to NS, the marketplace listings and auctions will also become a more popular place for buyers to shop.

Keep up the good work guys.

 

[namesilo]

** Big Announcement - Lower Fees!**

As part of our continuing effort to offer the lowest possible fees, we are happy to announce that we have lowered our standard 7.5% fee for Marketplace sales to just 3% for sales paid for via wire transfer (any other methods of payment are still 7.5%). While this lower fee applies to any sale paid for via wire, since our system requires a wire for sales over $5,000, this means that all sales over $5,000 will have just a 3% fee applied.

We have also removed the $15 fee for receiving your commission proceeds via wire. And, as is already the case, any sales paid via wire transfer (or Bitcoin or AliPay) qualify for immediate payout.

Therefore, as an example, if you sold a domain for $10,000 it would mean:

• $300 in fess (you get $9,700)
• The buyer gets the domain immediately upon receipt of the wire
• You can withdraw your $9,700 in earnings immediately upon payment receipt
• If you withdraw via wire, Bitcoin, check (available only to US residents currently) or to your account funds, you receive the full $9,700 without any other fees

You can get more information at https://www.namesilo.com/Support/Marketplace.

 

[namesilo]

Hi Everyone. We wanted to let you know about some major improvements we have made today in relation to the purchase paths within our Marketplace. These improvements were implemented based upon a lot of feedback we have received here and from other Sellers. ( @Arca - these changes should help address your recommendations above, but let us know if not). Here is a rundown:

• For offer/counter-offer sales:
  • There will now always be a Buy Now button on the offer/counter-offer page whether the Buyer is logged into an account or not
  • If the Reserve price equals the BIN, then multiple changes have been made:
    • The offer/counter-offer page is now entirely skipped as it serves no purpose. If the reserve equals the BIN, we now treat the sales as solely for the selected BIN with no opportunity to place lower offers.
    • If the BIN is lower than $5,000, the domain is added automatically to the Buyer's cart (whether logged in or not) whether originating from a landing page or an internal link from within our Marketplace. This is the same for both the "Buy Now" and "More Info" buttons on landing pages. If a payment plan is offered, the Buyer is taken directly to the payment plan page. This will greatly reduce the number of clicks and superfluous information Buyers were presented with previously.
    • If the BIN is higher than $5,000 (or a payment plan is setup with a down payment higher than $5,000) then a wire transfer is required. In these cases, we have also greatly streamlined the process whether the Buyer is logged in or not.

We have made a few other changes as well to improve verbiage throughout the different possible paths and also to tried to remove anything that could be confusing to Buyers. We expect that these changes will really help with sales conversions.

As always, we appreciate all of the responses we get on NP, direct emails to our support team or anywhere else. Our goal is to provide the best possible experience, functionality and options to help you run your domain sales in the ways that work best for you. If you are an existing Seller using our Marketplace, please take a look at the changes when you can and let us know with any feedback.

We hope you like the updates!

 

[namesilo]

I wanted to give a quick update on our Marketplace performance as we are only a few days shy of our 1-year anniversary since launching the Marketplace. Here is a look at our results for our first 12 months:

• Over 55,000 domains have been listed for sale
  • Over 40,000 Offer/Counter-offer domains listed for sale
    
  • Over 15,000 Auction domains listed for sale
• 578 domains have been sold
  • 422 via Offer/Counter-offer sale
  • 156 via Auction sale
• $145,687 in total sales revenue
  • $124,763 sold via Offer/Counter-offer sale
  • $20,924 sold via Auction sale
• $252.05 average sale price
  • $295.65 average Offer/Counter-offer sale
  • $134.14 average Auction sale
• $3,000 largest Offer/Counter-offer sale
• $1,980 largest Auction sale
  
• 2 Buyer charge backs
• Average payout in 7.3 days

We are pleased with the results from our first year offering our Marketplace. The number of available sales and total sales revenue has gone up nearly every month compared to the previous month.

Still, we understand that there are some things we can improve upon and are planning to do so. We feel we are an excellent option for sales under $1,000 as those do not require a wire. We are considering ways to offer the same ease of purchase for sales over $1,000 while protecting our marketplace from charge backs, fraud, etc. We also have plans for further expansion in a number of areas. I can't give details now, but 2017 should see some pretty exciting enhancements.

Also, please note that while we of course would like everyone to use our Marketplace, we still want to provide other options to help you gain exposure for your domain sales efforts. This is why we are SedoMLS and Afternic Fast Transfer partners, and also why we offer many other free services for managing your entire domain portfolio with us or any other registrar as well as offering a platform for listing your domains from any registrar for sale - and completely for free. If you are unfamiliar with these options, you can learn more here:

https://www.namepros.com/threads/namesilos-domain-investor-tools-marketsites.949242/

We made the post above in early November 2016. At that time (about 8 months ago), we were very happy to see momentum starting to build for our Marketplace. As noted, at the time of that post, we had generated a total of $145,000 of domain sales in the first full year of our Marketplace. I am very pleased to report some more recent results....

In the first half of 2016, we have generated over $450,000 of sales, with our largest 2 months of Marketplace revenue happening in the last 2 months in a row.... June 2017 alone saw $116,190 in sales!

Many of the ratios listed from our November 2016 post above are still holding regarding the ratio of sale types (auction versus offer/counter offer). A few other pieces of data from just the first half of 2017:

Note that Offer/Counter-offer sale means a pure BIN sale in many cases

• $450,967.35 in total sales revenue

• $399,453.20 sold via Offer/Counter-offer sale

• $51,514.15 sold via Auction sale

• 1,083 domains have been sold
  

• 830 via Offer/Counter-offer sale

• 253 via Auction sale

• $416.40 average sale price

• $33,250 largest Offer/Counter-offer sale

• $10,100 largest Auction sale

• 71 sales setup with a payment plant

• 1 Buyer charge back

• Average payout in 6.4 days

We are very encouraged by this growth with our Marketplace and we would like to thank many NP members on this thread and others for their very helpful and well-thought out ideas for improvement. We remain committed to offering a good option for your domain sales and continuing to enhance our offering.

Thanks everyone!

 

[CJ6]

Transfer deal to celebrate?

 

[namesilo]

Hey Everyone. We wanted to let you know that we have just released a new landing page template! This new template is a responsive design that is our first template to include a contact form directly on the landing page. All of the configuration variables available with our other templates (show/hide buttons, list other domains for sale, adding text, etc.) are available with this new template. The only display configuration options is the highlighted text color, but the other colors are pretty muted so should work well. Any visitors who complete the form will have their submitted information emailed to the main account email address we have for you. You can see the new template on the bottom of this page: https://www.namesilo.com/Support/Marketplace

Again, the template is entirely backward-compatible with our other templates so feel free to change any existing sales to using the new template if you want to try it out. Just make sure you use a somewhat dark color for the font color since the background is light-grey and white.

Hope you enjoy and more to come!

 

[namesilo]

Thanks for your feedback @Arca . A few quick replies:

- Can you implement minimum offer? It’s currently possible to make a $1 offer via this form. My own experience with anything goes/no minimum offer landing pages is that they generate a lot of useless $1, $10, $20, offers from low-ballers and time wasters that never turn into sales. Maybe an offer/counter offer listing’s minimum offer can be carried over to this form?

We should be able to do this, but may take a little time.

- It would look better if you made the buy now/make offer buttons the same width, as they are nearly the same width already.

This has been done.

- Capitalization is not consistent. The form says Make an Offer and Submit Form, but also Buy now.

This has been done.

- A “payment plan” button would fit nicely between the BIN and “make offer” buttons. That would be a more intuitive way of letting landing page visitors check out this option if applicable.

We currently have the same button options on this template as we do for the others. We may adjust this moving forward.

- It might be good to put a namesilo.com logo in the footer or somewhere else on the page. The landing page design is totally different than the namesilo.com design, so indicating namesilo affiliation on the landing page would lessen some of the disorientation buyers might feel at first when they click on buy now or make offer after which they are sent to another website, namesilo.com, that looks entirely different from the landing page they were just on. After clicking one of these buttons on the landing page a buyer would expect to be sent to a second page with the same design as the initial landing page, not a different website altogether, so taking some steps to make this transition more smooth would provide a better user experience for buyers.

We added a highlighted "Sold securely via NameSilo" under the buttons. We feel like our logo would clutter the layout, but we may adjust based on other feedback.

- This would require more work to implement, but if you are planning to continue to develop this kind of landing page form option, then it would be nice if there could be a way to communicate with buyers that fill in the form directly via the namesilo system. For example, when you get an inquiry at DomainNameSales, the inquiry shows up in your DomainNameSales control panel "inbox", and you can respond to the inquiry via DomainNameSales (they send your response via email to the person who made the inquiry, and when they respond, the response shows up in your dashboard inbox). To have a "built in" way of managing and responding to landing page form inquiries and sending out accepted offer BIN links would be great.

Yes, we have considered an internal system for managing conversations with Buyers. If we do so, we will certainly implement within landers.

- Some sellers never call buyers, say if they are based in Europe or Asia and most inquiries come from the US, so it would be good if we could disable the phone number text box if we do not need buyers' phone numbers or if you could put "(optional)" in this box. Many people are highly privacy conscious these days and might be concerned about giving away too much personal information on a landing page that gives provides zero information about who and where the personal info they enter into the form is sent to. It’s currently possible to submit an inquiry without entering a phone number, but some buyers may not realize that, and just seeing that they seemingly have to enter their phone number which will be sent to an unknown source might be turn-off for them when they are considering to make an offer via the form.

We added "(optional)" to the phone field.

Thanks again for your feedback. Please remember it could take a little time for these changes to filter through to landing pages that have already been setup with this new template.

 

[Arca]

Awesome! Did you set BINs or were they make offers? Price? What type of domains? Be nice if there were more landing page options.

All had fixed BIN prices, and I only showed the BIN button on the landing page.

I think the only end-user friendly transaction system offered by NameSilo at the moment is for BIN priced domains at or under $1000.

Their system for this is extremely good. With such names, the BIN button on the landing page directly puts the domain into the buyers shopping cart (no need to register an account separately first), and all he needs to do is to provide personal info (for WHOIS and for account creation) and pay (lots of payment methods available), and the transaction is closed, and the buyer receives the domain immediately. This system is excellent, and it’s extremely easy for anyone to buy a domain in this way, as it is straight-forward and offers the path of least resistance, and it can also capture impulse buys, since everything takes place instantly.

On the other hand, for names priced over $1000, the BIN button on “auction” names does not put the name into the buyers shopping cart, but instead to a slightly confusing auction page, where it is not very clear whether or not the domain is available for instant purchase (due to the auction time ticker), and where the buyer needs to register an account first, and then proceed to bid exactly the same amount as the set BIN price (there is no BIN button). After that, buyer has 7 days to provide payment (only wire transfer), which provides ample time for the buyer to re-think the purchase.

I also find the "make offer" function they offer to be potentially too complicated for end-users, since the interested buyer first needs to register, and then fill in bid and how long the bid will be valid for, all on the bottom of a very text-heavy page, and if you add a buy it now price below $1000, it only shows as a tiny text-link on this page (and if the name is above $1000 it does show any BIN link on the make offer page, and if you use the landing page on “make offer” names with a BIN price above $1000, the “BIN” button does not allow you to buy the domain, but just directs you to a make offer page without any BIN button, which is quite confusing). I guess the whole process is okay if it's a very determined buyer, but if it is someone more undecided who is not very tech-savvy, they will probably deterred at some stage, and just move on to another name.

So, in its current iteration, the NameSilo marketplace is perfect for selling names with BIN price that you are willing to let go for $1000 or below, and perhaps not as good for selling names above $1000 or for using the make offer function. However, NameSilo have made lots of improvements to the marketplace since they launched it, so I’m sure many of the things above will be addressed over time.

Personally, one update I would like to see soon, is a small increase in the price of domains that can be put directly into the shopping cart and purchased immediately, for example if this system could be made available to names priced at or below $1250 or at or below $1500, instead of just for names priced below $1000, as is the case currently. Two of the sales I had were for $1K each, but I felt these names could have sold for more than this, however, I priced them at 1K just to make it a lot easier for interested buyers to buy them via the NameSilo marketplace system.

 

[namesilo]

I wanted to give a quick update on our Marketplace performance as we are only a few days shy of our 1-year anniversary since launching the Marketplace. Here is a look at our results for our first 12 months:

• Over 55,000 domains have been listed for sale
  • Over 40,000 Offer/Counter-offer domains listed for sale
    
  • Over 15,000 Auction domains listed for sale
• 578 domains have been sold
  • 422 via Offer/Counter-offer sale
  • 156 via Auction sale
• $145,687 in total sales revenue
  • $124,763 sold via Offer/Counter-offer sale
  • $20,924 sold via Auction sale
• $252.05 average sale price
  • $295.65 average Offer/Counter-offer sale
  • $134.14 average Auction sale
• $3,000 largest Offer/Counter-offer sale
• $1,980 largest Auction sale
  
• 2 Buyer charge backs
• Average payout in 7.3 days

We are pleased with the results from our first year offering our Marketplace. The number of available sales and total sales revenue has gone up nearly every month compared to the previous month.

Still, we understand that there are some things we can improve upon and are planning to do so. We feel we are an excellent option for sales under $1,000 as those do not require a wire. We are considering ways to offer the same ease of purchase for sales over $1,000 while protecting our marketplace from charge backs, fraud, etc. We also have plans for further expansion in a number of areas. I can't give details now, but 2017 should see some pretty exciting enhancements.

Also, please note that while we of course would like everyone to use our Marketplace, we still want to provide other options to help you gain exposure for your domain sales efforts. This is why we are SedoMLS and Afternic Fast Transfer partners, and also why we offer many other free services for managing your entire domain portfolio with us or any other registrar as well as offering a platform for listing your domains from any registrar for sale - and completely for free. If you are unfamiliar with these options, you can learn more here:

https://www.namepros.com/threads/namesilos-domain-investor-tools-marketsites.949242/

 

[Arca]

@namesilo - While the suggestions above are about smaller issues/things that could be improved, I did run into what I consider a significant issue with the performance of your landing pages. It's something I did not expect to be an issue, but it has turned out to be the most significant drawback for me when it comes to selling names via the NS marketplace, and I do think some major updates/optimization of your landing pages would be good in regards to the issues I will outline in the following.

To provide some context, I list all of my domains with a buy it now price (mostly in the $1000-5000 range) and I also let prospective buyers make me an offer (mostly with a minimum at or above $500, so as to weed out time wasters and tire kickers). Prior to using your landing pages, I pointed my domains to Afternic's landing pages (example), and I pretty consistently got multiple offers per week, and a good chunk of those turned into sales every month. In my experience, taking offers and then negotiating with buyers is an effective way of selling names via type-in traffic, in addition to the sales gotten from outright BIN sales. There are some people who just won't pay the list price, and giving them a discount has worked well for me in terms of selling to buyer's who wouldn't have bought the name at the full price, so it's a good way to add to total sales.

However, after I moved my domains over to NameSilo's landing pages, I am getting very few offers compared with before. The main issue seems to be that there is no indication whatsoever on the initial landing page that there is a make offer option. While I'm not a big fan of Afternic's for sale landing page, one thing it does well is to make the BIN price, along with the minimum offer price, clear to any visitors, with a form containing the minimum offer price and a make offer button. On your landing page, the buyer has to click on the "more info" button to find out that there is a make offer function, and it is only indicated by text (there are no visual cues, such as a make offer button). It appears that most buyers do not manage to figure this out or do not bother, because I am almost not getting any offers compared with before.

I thought the market might have slowed down since I moved over to your landing pages, but I moved a few hundred names back to Afternic landing pages again, and the offers immediately resumed at normal levels (and I turned several of them into sales). I moved those names back to NameSilo landing pages again, and the offers disappeared again, so the issue here seems to be with your current landing page design. Total offers are also way down compared with when I primarily forwarded my domains to Afternic landing pages.

The people who have made me offers via NameSilo so far are generally buyers who have been very eager to buy the domain, so they probably took their time to pour over all the details and figured out they could make an offer. I have sold nearly all domains I got offers for via your marketplace, so only very motivated buyers made an offer. The kinds of buyers who are looking at different options and just pass by and might have submitted an offer via Afternic's landing pages do not seem to do so with your landing pages, and I assume that many people may just quickly move on after seeing your landing page, without clicking through to collect more information. Unless they clicked on "more info", they didn't even know they could make an offer, which in turn have lead to lost sales opportunities.

I believe the shortcoming with your landing page is that everything except buying a name at BIN is very dependent on click-through and reading instructions. Unless somebody clicks on "more info" there is no way for them to know that they can make an offer. And even if they click through once, everything is just indicated in plain text, and worded rather passively. For example, the small text indicating "You must be logged in to your account to submit an offer" which then sends them to a log in page, where they have to click on sign up (why not to a sign up form instead, as 99% of end-users probably do not have an existing namesilo account?), and then go to make an offer. In this area, a better call to action design would be to have a make offer form in the "submit offer" box on the offer/counter offer page, and a button for them to "make an offer", which would then send them to the sign-up form, which would work better at prompting the visitor to make an offer.

While I have nothing to compare with when it comes to the payment plans, I do believe these probably suffer from the same problem as make offer. I have a few domains being paid for via the payment plan right now, but I have not seen as many payment plan sales as I had expected. While the availability of a payment plan is indicated on the initial landing page, a visitor needs to click on "more info" and then hover over the small question mark on the offer-counter offer page, which then shows a pop up that says "If you click the Buy Now link on this page, you will be taken to a page where you can select to either buy the domain for full price today, or setup a payment plan requiring a partial down payment today and then monthly payments for your desired term until the full purchase price has been paid." Then they have to click on the small plain text buy now link, and then finally they get to see the payment plan. This would be the most likely way for a prospective buyer to reach the payment plan page ("more info" is more intuitive than "buy now" if they want info about the payment plan), via a for sale page with BIN and make/offer setup. It strikes me as an unnecessarily complicated path, and probably has a negative effect on how many people actually buy names via this option, similar to how the current setup does not work well for bringing in offers. And if they do click on the "buy now" button, and get taken to the payment plan page in that way, they may not return to the landing page, and then click "more info", which would let them discover that there is a make offer option. These two different "paths" may end up excluding each other, as a less motivated buyer may not bother clicking around to figure out the options available to them (and ideally they shouldn't have to).

I think your landing page + path to buy/make offer/payment plan needs to be integrated and streamlined in order to provide more intuitive and easy access for buyers.

Suggestion for long term solution: It does not seem easy to "update" one of the current templates to address these issues, so I suggest creating a new landing page (template # 3) where BIN, Make Offer, and payment plan details are all clearly shown on the landing page, so as to avoid all the complications, click-through requirements, and instructions reading currently needed in some scenarios currently, just to get certain info/take certain actions. The drawbacks pointed out above might be dealt with by including the following elements on the landing page:

1. The price clearly indicated with a BIN button that puts the domain directly into the shopping cart (for names priced below $5000).
2. A make offer form with the minimum offer listed, where a visitor can enter their offer, click on a make offer button, which would then send them to a sign-up page, and then lastly let them confirm/finalize their offer details.
3. A "start payment plan" button that leads directly to the payment plan info page. Perhaps also add some basic relevant (and enticing) info to the landing page, such as longest payment period available + lowest monthly payment available. For example, if a name is listed for sale at $2600, you might indicate on the landing page that they can take control of the domain today for as little as $200, followed by 12 monthly payments of $200 per month.

Short term solution: Improve the offer/counter offer page that buyers see after clicking on "more info".

I don't know whether the suggestions I have provided here are the best way to fix the landing page issue, but based on my own experience and testing so far, I do think the landing page performance issues I have pointed out here are real and do negatively affect sales (by missing out on offers/leads), and I hope this is something you can look into as you continue improving the marketplace.

 

[namesilo]

It is one of the most amazing things in the report. Such a low % of chargebacks in "buyer-not-present" online ecommerce transactions...

Yeah, we agree... running the Marketplace comes with a lot of risk to us so we have taken several steps to minimize the number of charge backs and payment disputes. It is a careful balance between convenience for buyers and our need to protect ourselves from charge backs, and we are very happy of the results we've been able to achieve on this topic.

 

[lennco]

Just received their email,


We are extremely excited to announce the launch of our Domain Marketplace today! We are offering a full-featured marketplace for the buying and selling of domain names with several features for both buyers and sellers. Our commission rate of a flat 7.5% is extremely competitive and there are no minimums or listing fees. You can get started listing your domains for sale via the Domain Manger page and we handle the entire process from listing through payment and payout.

Some highlights of our Domain Marketplace include:

• Easily sell your domains via an auction or offer-counter system
• No minimums
• No listing fee
• No need to use a third-party for payment processing - all orders handled directly via the NameSilo web site
• Payout to account funds, Paypal, or check
• Buyers can pay in Credit/debit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, Skrill, Dwolla, or Wire

We hope you enjoy this new service and let us know what you think! Thanks,
The NameSilo Team

 

[namesilo]

We've had a few people ask us for information regarding sales in our Marketplace. We have decided to date not to share information on specific sales for privacy reasons, but we can report that entering our 7th month of our Marketplace, and we have processed 138 sales for just over $52,000. Each month besides one has seen an increase in the number of sales as well as the sales amounts. We will also be working Marketplace domains into our purchase path before long, so that should help increase exposure as well. Thanks to everyone who has given our Marketplace a try thus far!

 

[namesilo]

Can you add a watchlist for marketplace and expiring domain auctions, I find I'll find something listed with a while to go, and then forget about it, due to my lack of organisation!

Ok - all set! We have now added watchlist functionality to our Marketplace. Adding a sale to your watchlist will result in our system emailing you upon changes to the sale. Hope this helps!

 

[Arca]

There has been so much talk about HugeDomains.com starting to offer payment plans, along with the sales increases this option presumably have brought them (as it significantly lowers the barrier to buying $X,XXX domains for end-users). As far as I know, NameSilo is the first fully-fledged domain sales marketplace to make this much-requested feature available to domainers.

The increase in the requirement of wire payment from $1000 to $5000, now allowing payments up to $5000 to be funded with PayPal, credit card and other popular payment processing methods definitively removes what was a significant restriction at the marketplace, as the wire payment option was not able to capitalize on impulse buys, caused more inconvenience to certain buyers, and could be a deterrent especially for overseas buyers. The new limit surely offers buyers convenience and the path of least resistance, and moreover, NameSilo’s payment options are now better than those of Afternic, where they require a wire for payments of $2500 and above, and in line with Sedo's, where they require a wire for payments on sales of $5000 and above.

These significant updates, combined with the already solid package offered by the marketplace, and a record low 7.5% commission fee, now makes the NS marketplace look like the most attractive domain marketplace out there. Will probably move my whole portfolio over to NS landing pages in time.

Great news and thank you for continuously improving you registrar and all the accompanying services you offer to domainers.

 

[Arca]

thanks.. its a lot of words and I'd kinda like to know.. so let me make sure we're talking about same thing.. I was talking about the freestore you offer to people.. here is the pic of landing page I meant. can you say if you plan to add leasing options there and/or if at all possible for outside domains? thank you again

Payment plans are obviously not going to be available to domains at other registrars. That would extend far beyond the way their marketplace currently operates. There is no way for NameSilo to control those domains like they are able to do with in-house held domains. That’s why marketplaces like Sedo and Afternic are not implementing this feature, because the logistics of holding these domains at a bunch of different registrars while they are being paid for (or returning them to the owner, in case the buyer decides to stop paying) would be a huge headache. HugeDomains is able to do this because it all happens in-house at NameBright. And the same goes for the NameSilo marketplace.

 

[namesilo]

Hi Everyone,

We are excited to announce that, based on popular demand, we have just added API controls for our Marketplace! You can now use our API to add sales, modify sales and view details on active sale. This allows for programmatic interfaces with our Marketplace and we hope makes it easier for you to add and maintain your sales in our Marketplace. We have a few other things we'll be doing in the coming weeks to take further advantage of this new functionality so stay tuned!

Here are links with more information:

https://www.namesilo.com/api_reference.php#marketplaceAddOrModifySale

https://www.namesilo.com/api_reference.php#marketplaceActiveSalesOverview