Right now if you try to add to SellerHub a name (registered elsewhere) that someone else left listed on SellerHub (supposedly prior to expiry) the only process is manually going through service. Unlike competitors like Sedo, Afternic and Atom, there is not a simple automated process using your unique SellerHub TXT verification. Rather, they will manually instruct you to temporarily add a new TXT code. I can't for the life of me see how that adds any security.
As a new marketplace they probably don't yet have a lot of these. But give it about a year, and service will grind to a halt if they keep doing them this manual way. At Afternic typically 25% of the names I add have been left up by the previous owners. Since many domainer acquisitions are from expired auctions, closeouts, or using ExpiredDomains to find recently dropped domains, that is not unusual.
Here are some numbers. Twice at SellerHub I have needed to go through this manual process. Both times there were from names that had expired, I had registered them at a different registrar. Each time was 2 domains, so 4 in total. I noted and the first time took 26 minutes of my, and the Spaceship Agent time. At the end of that, the old listings were taken down, so I could add them with my TXT codes as normal.
But what if say in a year 2 million new listings are being added to SellerHub and 25% of them, in a year's time, are stale listings? That is 500,000 x (26/60) = 217,000 hrs of service help time. If the effective wage is $20 per hour, that is a needless annual cost of about $4.3 million per year to Spaceship. Do I have your attention yet, Spaceship? For something that could readily be automated, like your competitors do.
The most recent time, was even worse. It was for two .com names. Clearly the names had expired. I had registered them at a different registrar. I had put my unique TXT codes. I had talked to Alf, trying to convince him/it that what he was telling people was not right, and that this really needed to get to people in charge. He told me he would, but hey I know that AI just tells people what they want to hear, most times, so trying this here. Anyway, yes those two names are listed, but this time after two days.
@Spaceship you really, really need to automate text verification for names left listed on SellerHub by previous owners and not simply say they fail and you need to contact support to handle each one manually.
I like many things about your marketplace (especially the commission and the landers and the prominence of how listings appear at Namecheap), but if you don't fix this the unnecessary costs and domainer frustration will be significant. I've listed over 800 names at SellerHub. 796 smoothly. But these 4 were a headache. Please listen.
Thank you,
Bob
