Spaceship.com - Marketplace Thread

[DomainRecap]

Spaceship.com recently launched a new Marketplace section, and as NamePros has given me the go-head, I think the company deserves its own thread for NP domain marketplace users to converse in.

https://www.spaceship.com/sellerhub/

Personally speaking, I will be setting up a new Spaceship.com account this weekend and going to work investigating its various features, options and policies.

 

[fka1080405]

As I understand it Spaceship doesn't have a marketplace apart from BrandStore, which can't actually be used for sales yet, so what exposure are you referring to? All I can see that Spaceship currently offers for sellers is the lander, marketing and actually selling the names is still on the seller. Or are you saying you really did zero listing/marketing/awareness for the domains you sold via Spaceship?

Domain name sales typically come via type in traffic or the registration path at a registrar with after market syndication. Afternic's 30% commission is considered worth it by many domain name investors because Afternic inventory is syndicated to GoDaddy, e.g: if you search for "example.com" on GoDaddy and "example.com" is listed with Afternic, then GoDaddy will encourage the user to buy it from within the registration flow. And that generates a lot of sales!

Spaceship is owned by Namecheap, the second largest registrar: Namecheap syndicates Spaceship's inventory as part of their registration flow. If you look in your domain's Spaceship statistics, you should see search volume from Namecheap listed. Your domains could be receiving hundreds or even thousands of views per month via Namecheap's search. The commission Spaceship charge combined with their reach through Namecheap is what makes Spaceship so compelling.

(Marketplaces like BrandStore are an as yet unproven concept, there is no compelling evidence that they generate sales, the syndication of Spaceship inventory to Namecheap is likely orders of magnitude more valuable than BrandStore could ever hope to be. If marketing domains is part of your strategy, that puts you in a small minority: the majority are just adding their domains to Spaceship (Afternic, Sedo...) and waiting. People love Spaceship because of the low commission + Namecheap syndication.)

 

[dr manos]

As I understand it Spaceship doesn't have a marketplace apart from BrandStore, which can't actually be used for sales yet, so what exposure are you referring to? All I can see that Spaceship currently offers for sellers is the lander, marketing and actually selling the names is still on the seller. Or are you saying you really did zero listing/marketing/awareness for the domains you sold via Spaceship?

Hi,


When you add names with BIN at seller hub after some seconds these names appear with price (and make offer if you acivated as well) when someone is searching at Namecheap (2nd biggest registrar with good sales activity), this is what i mean exposure.
I checked WHOIS after the sales and all 5 names gone to namecheap, so sales were via search and not type in.
For your question, i just liσted the names with bin/make offer, nothing more

 

[4L.com]

I don't know if anyone has already mentioned the strange price priority issue with Spaceship-listed domains when searching for them on Namecheap, but I'll mention it just in case. All my domains (which are registered with Spaceship) are also listed for sale in Spaceship's Sellerhub. At the same time, all of them are also listed on Afternic with a higher price to cover the difference in commissions. For example, the domain aauz.com.
If you open the link https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?domain=aauz.com
You can see the correct price from Sellerhub: $1,999.
However, if you open the listing page https://www.namecheap.com/market/buynow/aauz.com/
it shows the Afternic price - $2,499 instead of $1,999.
It seems very illogical to sell the same domain at two different prices on the same website. I would like the correct price, taken from Spaceship, to be displayed on the listing page.

 

[End Game]

Why doesn't Spaceship have a link where we can list our entire domain portfolio to other places like X?

 

[Hashim]

Domain name sales typically come via type in traffic or the registration path at a registrar with after market syndication. Afternic's 30% commission is considered worth it by many domain name investors because Afternic inventory is syndicated to GoDaddy, e.g: if you search for "example.com" on GoDaddy and "example.com" is listed with Afternic, then GoDaddy will encourage the user to buy it from within the registration flow. And that generates a lot of sales!

Spaceship is owned by Namecheap, the second largest registrar: Namecheap syndicates Spaceship's inventory as part of their registration flow. If you look in your domain's Spaceship statistics, you should see search volume from Namecheap listed. Your domains could be receiving hundreds or even thousands of views per month via Namecheap's search. The commission Spaceship charge combined with their reach through Namecheap is what makes Spaceship so compelling.

(Marketplaces like BrandStore are an as yet unproven concept, there is no compelling evidence that they generate sales, the syndication of Spaceship inventory to Namecheap is likely orders of magnitude more valuable than BrandStore could ever hope to be. If marketing domains is part of your strategy, that puts you in a small minority: the majority are just adding their domains to Spaceship (Afternic, Sedo...) and waiting. People love Spaceship because of the low commission + Namecheap syndication.)

Thank you for the detailed explanation, I appreciate it. I had known most of this but I didn't really make the connection that so many buyers actually go through the registrars' brokers compared to those that go directly to the domain and buy through landers.

Regarding marketplaces being unproven, I don't think this has been true for a while since a lot of the most valuable public domain sales in the NameBio threads come from places like Atom and fruits.co, but I'd be really interested to know just how much volume/revenue these represent vs those going through the registrars' brokers, especially when so many domains have marketplace landers on now.

 

[fka1080405]

Regarding marketplaces being unproven, I don't think this has been true for a while since a lot of the most valuable public domain sales in the NameBio threads come from places like Atom and fruits.co, but I'd be really interested to know just how much volume/revenue these represent vs those going through the registrars' brokers, especially when so many domains have marketplace landers on now.

For clarity, "marketplace" is an ambiguous catch-all term that is used to refer to any service that facilitates the sale of domain names. Fruits.co and Spaceship.com are equivalent, they're both "marketplaces" by most standards (because the search engine provided by Fruits is inconsequential). Atom and Spaceship are both marketplaces in the broad sense but Atom (and similar) are distinguished by their intended goal of helping potential buyers discover domains that they wouldn't have otherwise bought.

Atom has proven itself if it can create sales rather than just facilitate them. Sales can be facilitated by a landing page that someone made in an afternoon, because all that is needed is a payment button. Spaceship's success is evidence of this, it is just landing pages and they've already been party to more sales than Atom.

Marketplaces like Atom have, in my opinion, failed to prove that there is any money to be made in creating sales. Especially considering how much Atom spends to try and make these sales happen. Relative to the number of domains on their platform, Atom appear less than expected in top sales lists: if their approach was working, Atom would appear more than Spaceship in top sales.

Anyway, this is the Spaceship thread so I won't disparage Atom too much but I'll wrap this comment up with: marketplaces like Atom lean heavily on the traditional strategies that the industry is built on and so the ambiguity about the origin of their sales benefits them. Atom's business is reliant on selling a dream to domain name investors (sales can be created) while being supported by the traditional approach (domains sell themselves).

 

[Timkh]

Is anyone else experiencing a complete dry month at spaceship??
I’ve got 0 offers of any kind in the last 30 days
It’s strange

Yes. Over the past 2 months very few offers. And it's strange, considering that during the summer there were far more. I have no idea how to explain it. From time to time I test both the landings and Namecheap reg path, and everything seems to be working.

 

[Jannes]

Yes, dry seasons are normal per se, but something seems off. It could be the economy of course, but I will end up selling more on Sedo than on Spaceship this year, something I would not have thought possible in the summer. Crickets since then (on SellerHub). I wonder if there's some new hurdle or annoyance on the buyer's journey...

 

[phaethon]

Namecheap sales were 10% of Afternic sales annually if I remember well. I had just one Spaceship sale this year, it seems right. 0 offers, but I have disabled the minimum offer. I don't use their nameservers.

 

[Hashim]

Did you verify that your landers were all working? Last week I noticed that the landers for ocay.com and a few other recently imported domains were returning errors because the site wasn't reachable on HTTPS after adding the landers more than 48 hours ago. That was on Friday and they said they were looking into it and they "appreciated my patience", which I took to understand it was going to take a while. On Tuesday I still had no response and I had to email them again, for them to finally tell me it was a bug that should now be fixed but they still didn't know the cause of it. Maybe that means it still persists for some/most users, so check that all your landers are reachable on HTTPS.

 

[Jannes]

I always find some lander temporarily (?) without SSL if I start checking.

I think Namecheap CEO is stubbornly downplaying the importance of trust factor/signalling. "Listed with spaceship.com" "You will be redirected to spaceship.com", no mention of it being a Namecheap subsidiary or anything. The typical end user buyer will hesitate and try GoDaddy's reg path instead.

Sedo is lacking in many ways, but at least it has that trust factor.

 

[domainer8888]

I always find some lander temporarily (?) without SSL if I start checking.

I think Namecheap CEO is stubbornly downplaying the importance of trust factor/signalling. "Listed with spaceship.com" "You will be redirected to spaceship.com", no mention of it being a Namecheap subsidiary or anything. The typical end user buyer will hesitate and try GoDaddy's reg path instead.

Sedo is lacking in many ways, but at least it has that trust factor.

I think the idea is to onboard as many new customers to Spaceship as possible. I see no other reason why the checkout process on Namecheap can't be as seamless as with external listings. It is NOT in the interest of buyers and not in the interest of sellers.

 

[fozz]

I'm see a lot of "DNS records missing" messages in my account on domains yet they are all on SpaceShip DNS settings. The https: doesn't resolve.

 

[DigitalAsset]

Recently, I had my first sale through Spaceship marketplace. For 5% commission, I am pleased with their service and support. Quick payment and good customer support.

 

[Simon SE]

I like Spaceship but I've been getting a weird bug for days when searching for domains. The add to cart and pricing does not load 99% of time, but make offer does.

I've flagged it to them and they told me they are looking into it, but it can't be helping with conversion.

I've pointed out either things, like not small things either - to do with pricing errors on LTO prices on different currencies. At this point I am starting to feel like their own personal QA (but unpaid )

 

[Hashim]

I like Spaceship but I've been getting a weird bug for days when searching for domains. The add to cart and pricing does not load 99% of time, but make offer does.

I've flagged it to them and they told me they are looking into it, but it can't be helping with conversion.

Show attachment 288844


I've pointed out either things, like not small things either - to do with pricing errors on LTO prices on different currencies. At this point I am starting to feel like their own personal QA (but unpaid )

I feel the same with the bugs I've reported. Any software engineering company worth its salt should have CI/CD testing in place, at the very least covering the main conversion path, and this bug suggests they don't, which in turn suggests serious incompetence from a company this size and backed by a company of Namecheap's size. I don't know how closely Namecheap oversees Spaceship, but based on the Spaceship CEO's posts on here from about a year ago, I'm guessing it's more hands off than on, and that's a bad thing if it's being run incompetently. Sure, it's a pretty platform, but that doesn't mean it has good engineering and management, and those are the things that are going to make or break the company, not the design. The fact they didn't have tests to catch this, the fact they couldn't tell me what caused the SSL bug in my last case, the fact they've taken BrandStore live as a "beta" that can't actually be used yet, the fact their CEO outright dismissed criticism about logging in taking you straight to the domain registry page when 90% of the time you're going to be logging in to manage domains/DNS not register new ones - none of these add up to a good picture.

 

[fozz]

Adding external domains is not working today. You can upload but they are not labelled "external".

 

[DomDB]

I don't know if anyone has already mentioned the strange price priority issue with Spaceship-listed domains when searching for them on Namecheap, but I'll mention it just in case. All my domains (which are registered with Spaceship) are also listed for sale in Spaceship's Sellerhub. At the same time, all of them are also listed on Afternic with a higher price to cover the difference in commissions. For example, the domain aauz.com.
If you open the link https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?domain=aauz.com
You can see the correct price from Sellerhub: $1,999.
However, if you open the listing page https://www.namecheap.com/market/buynow/aauz.com/
it shows the Afternic price - $2,499 instead of $1,999.
It seems very illogical to sell the same domain at two different prices on the same website. I would like the correct price, taken from Spaceship, to be displayed on the listing page.
Show attachment 288173Show attachment 288174

I reached out to Namecheap support about this back in October and they responded with this:

Namecheap screenshots (NOTE: I am in no way affiliated with mue.com):

EDIT: it seems mue.com is not listed on Spaceship, but as a BIN on Namecheap Market. Same idea though.

 

[4L.com]

@Marina Savina @Spaceship
Hello. I have also noticed a very strange way of crediting funds for domain sales in currencies other than USD. All my domains are listed in the marketplace in USD. If a domain is purchased in another currency, I should receive the domain’s sale amount minus the commission. But right now, this is what happens:

Since September, the problem has still not been solved. When somebody buys domains in a currency other than the dollar, strange things still happen with how the funds are added to the balance.
7063.53 yuan - 5% = 6710.35 yuan. In the end, the balance shows 6710.35 dollars added, then this whole amount is removed, and only after that the amount from the domain sale in dollars is added.

 

[MasterOfMyDomains]

every name at spacecase when i try to add it to new cpanel, i get errors and need to validate. Never happened before.
Only domains at spaceship its happening.
Even my .ca are accepted after my mandatory 24 hour wait
Porkbun no issues, you every name an issue.
Glad everyone else is enjoying your serviceS