I am happy to help out on the forum and glad for the feedback from everyone here it helps us improve. I do take issue with the fact that there are some recent comments saying we don't listen or don't do anything in response. We have a really engaged team here from the brokers who close the deals on leads to the support and development teams who try and improve things continually.
I took over an hour to read through the first 12 pages of this thread and make notes as to the issues I saw brought up. I will put them below in bullet points and give resolutions where we have made them. Not counting the various bugs brought up in the thread - most of which are resolved per the thread by our team when brought up, I counted 12 issues below in bold with the response of what we have done so far.
Afternic names opting in and out on their own.
o We are working with 100’s of registrars. It is not always us opting them in and out. For the transfer process to work smoothly we need the Registrar where your names are registered to say your domains are ok to transfer. All in all while we continue to make improvements on the opt in process and have released changes this year on the back end there are a lot of moving parts and that is not always us. We work with over 100 various companies who change their statuses and technology as you would expect. I don't say this to excuse it, for your experience it should just work and you shouldn’t have to know about all the procedures and we are continuing to work towards that. We have not ignored it and have made back end improvements on our processes, technology, and working with other companies to improve the experience and will continue to do so. It has gotten better than it was when this thread was started 7 months ago and we are continuing to improve it.
Names stay in Review forever until you contact someone.
o We have implemented back end changes to help reduce this and have seen a big reduction in complaints regarding this issue. We also hired two people to help with this for bulk sellers. We have plans to continue improve this from a technology side. There is a big project being worked on currently and part of its work addresses this. Until then we decided to hire two additional people to help with sellers who have more than a few hundred domains. We also have the ability to check on the domains in the bulk management tools we offer via spreadsheets from inside the account. We also have made improvements in the normal support channels and anyone needing help with names can contact
[email protected] for additional help. We track each email that comes in to make sure service is quick and accurate. It certainly does still happen but less than it used to from some of the improvements we rolled out and there are others yet to come on the roadmap here.
Give more payment options to sellers like payoneer, skrill etc
o We opened PayPal payments up to International sellers as a result of this feedback and are looking at expanding other options. We are a big company with contracts in place with various vendors and cannot change payment options in a matter of months but we are actively speaking with many parties and will hold another review for additional payment providers early next year and did do a project to enable PayPal as an additional option as a result of the feedback here.
Emailing support with the contact page requires a captcha and after submitting it says we are looking forward to hearing from you. You don’t know if the email was sent or not, it doesn’t say it was. https://www.afternic.com/contact-afternic
o This is still like this. However, you can email Afternic support directly via
[email protected]. You will be able to easily track it from your own email.
Afternic website is not secure or secure when signing in.
o We have updated the afternic.com site to be more secure over the past 7 months. We do not pass your information such as passwords via any unsecured or unencrypted channel or method. There are I think two images that are still linked to an http page which throw a browser error saying that the site may not be secure and if you continue the images will not load. They are on a list of things being worked on but while not ideal this does not impact the security of your personal information in any way.
Can you enable symbols (!@#$%^&*- etc.) to be used in passwords – not secure and no 2fa
o Right now we do not offer 2fa but we are looking into adding special characters in the future.
Occasionally, some of my domains are inexplicably removed from my account, and there is no way for me to know that they have been removed.
o We will have support start contacting you when names are removed under certain circumstances where we manually remove them, such as notice that a name you own was sold elsewhere and has a new owner, removed because of a trademark etc.
Afternic is unfortunately troubled by a lot of bugs and problems, which makes it really crucial to counterbalance that with quick, responsive and helpful customer support. Many support tickets are unanswered or go a week or more before being replied to.
o We track ever ticket that comes in to us via email. 97% are answered in the first 24 hours that are sent to
[email protected].
Communicaton on sales process/steps/ status are poor and often not updated or informed on statuses and developments.
o We built a new dashboard for the buyer and seller that show the current status of the domains, what steps need to be taken and when you will get paid.
Various Parking complaints
o We revamped our parking platform and modernized the templates to be better performing including on ad block software etc. This was a major undertaking on the backend as well as integrating new technology that our upstream ad provider needed us to add to continue to serve ads. This was all completed in the past year.
Why does the interface limit you to 10 items per page, then 50 if you select show 50, which it promptly forgets as you navigate around? Just let users set it to 200 or 500 or whatever and retain the settings.
o This is being addressed but not until next year. It is being worked into another project already underway.
Various payment/communication issues around new Transaction Assurance process.
o We formed a special task force for this and met continually with leadership, development, product, support, and customers until we resolved all the main issues that we were made aware of. These were all resolved in the thread through a concerted effort by our sales, support, and development teams and taken very seriously.
During this time we also added 6 new fast transfer partners to our network.
o This is part of our commitment to help expand the exposure of your domains to put them in front of end users and generate even more sales.
Bottom line we are continually working on improvements and have done a lot of development work over the past 7 months in response to issues brought up on this thread. We understand we have more to do and will continue to work towards evolving our site and systems to better help you sell your domains so at the end of the day you make more money.
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