The gist of it is that we are now taking every name into an Afternic holding account and then moving it to the buyer. Once we get control of the domain we can pay you instead of waiting for the buyer to accept the domain or complete the transfer into their account.
This feature was announced in early April, and I was just wondering if there are any updates about when it will actually come into effect?
Both manual and fast transfer transactions are taking so much longer than they used to. I sold a name in end of may, Afternic took control of it immediately, and estimated payout is June 8. But it's still sitting in Afternic's holding account, 2 weeks later. I can't get paid until Afternic moves it to buyer. I have 3 other sold names also just sitting in Afternic's holding account right now, when transfer to another registrar could have completed for those sales already. Some of them haven't even been unlocked yet (so transfer has not even been initiated yet).
When Afternic receives a name under the "transaction assurance" system, it takes ages for the domain to be moved to buyer compared with how long it took in the old transaction system, which causes a major payout delay (since payment is scheduled only after the domain has been transferred to buyer).
Hope there will be some significant improvements in this area soon, as regular transactions are consistently taking 3-4 times as long to complete, from sale to payout, and transactions that inexplicably stall or where payments are being delayed are taking even longer than that.
A quick way to completely remedy this issue is just to introduce the feature you announced had been launched early April: "Once we get control of the domain we can pay you instead of waiting for the buyer to accept the domain or complete the transfer into their account." It's been 9 weeks since it was launched, this needs to be implemented now.
Also, the other issues that were pointed out upon launch, where the response was that fixes were being worked on, has not resulted in fixes actually materializing. Please add basic and bug-free functionality and features to the transaction assurance system. Please also re-introduce all the basic features that were stripped from the system (such as chat logs, domain sold date, whether it was an Afternic BIN/partner/premium network/standard network sale, etc.).
If it's impossible to bring back the basic functions provided by the old system, please bring back the old system. Please don't let us be stuck with this inferior downgrade if it cannot be brought up to the same level as the old transaction system.
I told myself to stop posting about Afternic platform and transaction assurance issues, as I have spent way too much time detailing about 20-25 platform issues and bugs in this thread over the past few months, but they are not being fixed, and updates are not being made. The only fix that might have come as a direct result of my reporting seems to be that emails for names sold at BIN are now being sent out again. So reporting problems and bugs has turned out to be a unproductive way of spending my time. But Afternic remains the best sales venue for me (55 sales in 2017 YTD, vs sales in the 5-15 range at all other marketplaces I am using), so I am consistently on the Afternic.com site multiple times every single day to deal with different stuff, and it's just so frustrating to deal with all these bugs and inefficiencies and the poor user experience that the website offers, day in and day out. I'm probably in the top 1-2% of users in terms of how much
time I spend on the afternic.com website, and I'm just all too familiar with every single bug and problem on the site by now... I'm trying to spend less time on reporting on Afternic problems, but its hard not to do so when there are so many problems with the platform, that I have to deal with every day... I really hope Afternic will surprise me and take some major steps towards fixing up the platform in the near future. The user experience is really bad and the site has far more bugs than any other marketplace in the domain industry. It's ridiculous to have such a powerful sales network, coupled with such an outdated website to use this network. Afternic.com is supposed to be a functional gateway for accessing and utilizing your great sales network, and I hope the platform will some day be fixed and updated to reflect that.
