Atom marketplace (formerly Squadhelp Marketplace)

[JudgeMind]

Hey Folks,

I've just started using squadhelp.com to list some of my brandable. So far I have 76 domains listed, there is no fee to list. I've had some decent action so far in the way of interested buyers but no sales as of yet. I've only been with them for 1 week now.

A bit of a summary review of SquadHelp:

PROS

• No Listing fee
• No Logo design fee
• Ability to submit your names to end users holding naming contests
• Ability to chat directly or send a message directly to end users.
• Stats of your marketplace domains are shown in the marketplace dashboard.
• Their customer service and support has been great, 24hr a day chat.
• Ability to increase or decrease the list price of your domains or to show a discount. You can decrease or increase the price yourself by $200. If you want to lower more, you can contact support.
• End users can shortlist your domains before they make a decision on which they want to purchase. The number of shortlists is shown in you marketplace dashboard.
• When you submit your names you get to set the price you wish to get. Because their commissions are high I recommend listing at a higher price to offset the commission costs.
• Their landing pages are fairly basic but they work. Because the marketplace is fairly new, I'm sure we will see style improvements in the future.
• One thing I really like is they accept multiple extensions. I have listed .co and .io along with .com
• Each seller gets a direct link to their marketplace portfolio, HERES MY PORTFOLIO. It is handy if your trying to p[promote your portfolio through social media.
• I like that their marketplace doesn't have tens of thousands domain listings like BB. They are fairly strict on the domains they accept to list and so this helps keep the number of domains in the marketplace down and gets your listings more exposure.

CONS

• Their commissions are very high, depending on the domain name they are usually between 30% and 35%. However, there are no listing fees, no logo design fees, so in the end their commission is very similar to brand buckets.
• Their logos are not top quality, in fact I requested to have some of my logos remade.
• I think they have a big backlog of logos to design, the wait time for logo design has been around 1 week, but your names are still listed while the logos are being designed.
• After your names are accepted you need to agree to their commission rate, at this point you also need to apply your own keywords, descriptions etc. I found this was very time consuming.

 

[JudgeMind]

anyone else notice their percentile ranking drop immensely over the past few days?

4 days ago I had a 92% score, today my score is 39%...

@GrantP

 

[NameWell]

anyone else notice their percentile ranking drop immensely over the past few days?

4 days ago I had a 92% score, today my score is 39%...

@GrantP

Most likely you have been blocked from a contest or even few contests. Contest blocks have a strong impact on percentile scores. There's a lot about that on SH forum.

 

[Laguna]

anyone else notice their percentile ranking drop immensely over the past few days?

4 days ago I had a 92% score, today my score is 39%...

@GrantP

Same here

 

[capybara]

This whole ranking system is rigged against the domain owners. You pitch your own domains, you get rejected much more often, your ranking goes down. Then people look at this ranking and think "this guys a loser, no way I am buying a losers name, I want my business to succeed", so you drown even deeper.

 

[Stankodomains]

I have few observations and questions:
- What is SH position on the sharks offering whopping 1% of the listed value to purchase names on the NP forums? Wasn't the whole idea to create an exclusive marketplace? This kills the whole idea of the SH wholesale.
- People conveniently hand registering names submitted to the contests. After reporting SH is happy to send the generic answer of how important we are and how serious they are about investigation, but does SH really believe that the cheaters would publicize their whois record? Farce at it's best.
- Nonexistent distinction of whether the contest holder is willing to actually purchase a premium domain, there is only a vague statement that such names are accepted to the contest. As a result premium submissions always get negative rating (no thank you) and opportunity to reach or maintain tier A status is greatly diminished. How about making the distinction and not counting negative rating for premium submissions.
As a result I see winning names that make very little sense or ideas that anybody could hand register. Many of these business will fail based on the name they choose.
- Some domains have obvious preferential treatment and they are always at the top of suggestions and front pages, huge minus.
- Like it was mentioned before, I would love to be able register the domains after they haven't been sold in a couple of years. Otherwise SH is a self benefiting crowd sourcing platform.
The crowd sourcing model is very similar to stock photo agencies. Most of them are failing miserably because they are ignorant to the needs of submitters and prefer to cater to clients only
- I would like to see an option of SH paying for renewal of my registrations that have been accepted as premiums. As a result SH could add an extra 5% to their commission after the sale and a small fine if I decide to delist the name. This creates an opportunity commitment on both sides
- I would like to see more effort in promoting BasicPlus listings and an option for us to submit our own logo
- More objectivity when it comes to acceptance of domains to the premium market. Example a name like Squaad gets rejected but shortly after Squuad gets accepted. Hard to say if this is bias, subjectivity or cheating, since there is a very fine line here.
- I would like to have a non generic comment by the inspector of the rejection reasons. This will immensely improve the future submissions and our rating percentage, since obviously we will become more careful and knowledgeable with our submissions. Again, work with submitters, not against us, failing to understand this will inevitably lead to your demise, it is just a matter of time when another agency creates a model that favors the submitters and we all take our business over there.
P.S. I see that most of my points have been discussed before, thanks to all who brought the attention.

 

[NYJimbo]

anyone else notice their percentile ranking drop immensely over the past few days?

4 days ago I had a 92% score, today my score is 39%...

@GrantP

I think there is a rolling/moving ranking based on the previous 180 days of participation. Maybe the moving window passed some time you were doing very well ?

 

[BrandCollectors.com]

submission domains to sh is not free?

 

[NYJimbo]

As I'm sure many of you have experienced it, when I go to some websites I see the Squadhelp ads with listings of domains for sale.

For the first time I am seeing one of my names in the group and have been seeing it for a few days now.

Have any of you had a sale of a name soon after seeing it in the SH ads ?

 

[NameWell]

As I'm sure many of you have experienced it, when I go to some websites I see the Squadhelp ads with listings of domains for sale.

For the first time I am seeing one of my names in the group and have been seeing it for a few days now.

Have any of you had a sale of a name soon after seeing it in the SH ads ?

Have you visited the landing page of that name recently? I noticed, that when I visit landing pages of my names I start seeing some of those names in the ads soon after that.

To answer your question, no, I did not notice any correlation between the names I saw in ads and the names that were sold.

 

[JudgeMind]

Have you visited the landing page of that name recently? I noticed, that when I visit landing pages of my names I start seeing some of those names in the ads soon after that.

To answer your question, no, I did not notice any correlation between the names I saw in ads and the names that were sold.

its retargeted advertising

 

[Ostrados]

After a slow couple of months with no sales squadhelp has started to re-align. 3 sales in December include:

Vetovia.com
Thredly.com
Accoria.com

I was considering moving my names from the platform but so long as these types of results continue forth I will build on my current portfolio.

Good news and congrats for the sales..
I was thinking about moving my domains out as well! what is your Sell through rate last 6 months?

 

[NameWell]

its retargeted advertising

Yes. Too bad the algorithm can't tell who are sellers and who are buyers and haunts sellers with ads too But I'm still happy they are doing retargeting. It gives a little nudge to potential buyers that are hesitant

 

[DomainBanana]

Yes. Too bad the algorithm can't tell who are sellers and who are buyers and haunts sellers with ads too

It could, if done properly...

 

[bojan1]

Today I sold one domain at SH wholesale marketplace and SH took zero commission.

 

[Recons.Com]

@GrantP I pm-ed you with no response in almost a week. I have concerns given that I have zero sales in considerable time with portfolio of about 60 names and would like to get some insights before deciding to pull out, stay or grow.

 

[GrantP]

There should be a limit to the number of names sellers can increase their prices, may be 10 to 15% of the entire portfolio, same way you peg make offer. Otherwise, sellers will misuse the opportunity and every crap will be priced at 5k and above. You know the result of such action @GrantP

Thanks for the feedback. We will monitor this closely and if we find that this feature is leading to pricing issues, we will introduce some additional limits.

 

[GrantP]

Pricing flexibility... and then when you go to see what the price change dropdown list looks like you see that you can only have a max of $200 less than your current price.

Would you mind reporting this issue via Blue Button so we can investigate it? The price dropdown shows the values based upon your original approved price. If your domain is still set to the original price that it was approved for, it should allow you to select a higher price in the dropdown.

 

[GrantP]

@GrantP I haven’t received an update regarding SH’s investigation into this incident since the 8th. The most recent email states “We are committed to protecting the hard work of our creatives...”. I find “committed to...” a rather shifty term for any business to use. It implies a promise, without explicitly stating so, and thus, leaves some convenient wiggle room.

How committed is SquadHelp? The contest had 21 shortlisted names. 5 of them have since been reported as registered. What steps is SquadHelp taking to “protect the hard work” of those people whose names were reported?

While we can not discuss specific incidents in a public forum, I understand where you are coming from. When a domain registration is reported, we follow this process to handle such issues. We've had too many situations where it later turned out that the domains were registered by someone other than CH (e.g. sometimes by other creatives, sometimes by a person unrelated to CH etc). Therefore we can not automatically assume that the registration was done by the CH - and we follow the above process in every situation.

Our recommendation is to always register your good domains before submission to contests (you can submit them as Basic listing or Basic Plus even if they are not approved as Premium domains). However we understand that this can get costly, and you may need to balance the risk vs reward when deciding whether or not to participate by submitting unregistered domains to contests.

 

[GrantP]

Ouch...

Yesterday (12/25), I regged a domain, then earlier today (12/26), submitted it to SH...

... but noticed it has a (12/18) submit date.

Show attachment 140008

As the domain was recently dropped (after full expiration cycle), I assume this domain was submitted unregistered? If it's accepted, will whomever submitted it unregistered assume SH registered it themselves?

This is one of the several scenarios where two different creatives/ sellers have likely thought about the same name within a short period of time. Our contest platform alone receives more than 200,000 submissions per month, and it is surprising to see how often the same name was thought about by two different creatives/ sellers within a short period of time.

 

[GrantP]

anyone else notice their percentile ranking drop immensely over the past few days?

4 days ago I had a 92% score, today my score is 39%...

@GrantP

Our percentile scoring algorithm is highly sensitive to number of contest blocks one creative may receive in comparison to other creatives who participated in the same contests. We are closely monitoring the algorithm and may adjust it in near future to handle the contest blocks slightly differently. In the meantime, the score should recover on its own as long as you accumulate more likes by submitting relevant names in contests.

 

[JudgeMind]

k

 

[NameWell]

Today I sold one domain at SH wholesale marketplace and SH took zero commission.

I think you will have to pay a 10% withdrawal fee from that amount when you decide to withdraw your money. But I might be wrong.

 

[bojan1]

I think you will have to pay a 10% withdrawal fee from that amount when you decide to withdraw your money. But I might be wrong.

Actually I have already withdraw money without paying any commission. That's why I wrote that
Before, I used to pay... but now didn't.

 

[NameWell]

Actually I have already withdraw money without paying any commission. That's why I wrote that
Before, I used to pay... but now didn't.

Oh, I see! That's cool!

 

[wwwulff]

I sold a name today with a 6 month installment plan - This is my 2 sale out of 11 name listed (had my first sale in august 4 week after I opened an account)