Undeveloped.com Experience

[JudgeMind]

Has anyone used undeveloped.com to sell domains? They claim to be able to increase a domainers sales by 54%.

 

[Optimal Names]

Its taken off while the sale is agreed but if you have no joy getting funds its easy to get it back listed.

Maybe the only way is for them to place a small deposit to remove fake buyers..

I have suggested this many times, over many years, at many platforms - not just at undeveloped. But I've heard arguments against asking for a deposit, some of those are logical and good arguments too. I dont know what the answer is. The world is full of dishonest people and many of them will a big surprise. I had a CEO of a very large European corporation offer me $10K for a two word dot com about 8 years ago. I agreed, sent him the escrow.com link - he never opened it, never replied to my emails, not even when I asked him to just say "no thanks, no longer interested". I checked, he didnt die either. I did have that happen to me once...

And most recently with Undeveloped, I had a $5000 offer from the COO of a large IT consulting firm in NYC which I accepted and then he went cold for weeks. Eventually Undeveloped got a hold of him and he told them that "his assistant was supposed to make the offer $500 and added an extra 0". But it took weeks of calls and emails from Undeveloped to get him to say that? So I declined. A few weeks later a CIO at the same company made me an offer for $800 and said he needed it for a project but didnt have a lot of funds. I didnt know he was the CIO until after I declined the offer and some weeks later began to really look into the name and IP address location and linked that guy to being the CIO of the same firm but with a somewhat different name, throwaway email, etc.

So bottom line is, people will do anything to try to shave down the price. They'll also make offers and never reply. I've been doing this for 18 years and I've been cursed at, threatened, you name it. But I've also sold a lot of domains too - so its worth the trouble. I just wish there was an answer that was easy to implement for all parties. There doesnt seem like there is though.

 

[Optimal Names]

One last question: Should I used my real name on the domain name landing pages or a business Alias..?

Used to use my real name many years ago until I had a buyer start cursing at me and threatening me which led me to change my name to an alias. He was located close enough to me, in terms of this large planet we live on, to make me worry.. But that is my experience, you decide what is best for you.

 

[alcy]

but sales can fail on any platform.. gd.. afternic.. undev.. I think we all had unpaid sales everywhere.. not just undev.

maybe it jut means buyers weren't serious to begin with. in which case if you start charging them upfront a deposit, they'll just never go through with it.

so instead of wasting potential leads.. and charging deposits.. I think its best to leave things as they are.. especially now that undev impleneted ability for seller cancel sale via panel any time he wants..

if ever undev starts charging people to make offer like domainagents, then that'd be the day I leave them.. however, if they want to make this option for some peoople .. and just add option to settings saying "charge buyer [amount] to make offer"... then why not.. they can even let sellers set amounts I guess.. I think its kinda fixed on domain agents..

since its not possible ot please all people.. its best to add options to settings for this stuff..

and in meantime, we can all just move our "sold" undev names to another lander.. bodis or whatnot.. so leads keep coming in if undev fails... of course. makeoffer only.

 

[creataweb]

Give us the option to charge a non-refundable fee to avoid the time wasting, fake offers. I keep half and UD keeps half. I too have received more thru UD than anywhere else. This locks my name up for weeks while it shows a sold page with other peoples domains below all the while I am losing other potential offers.

 

[joro001]

Give us the option to charge a non-refundable fee to avoid the time wasting, fake offers. I keep half and UD keeps half. I too have received more thru UD than anywhere else. This locks my name up for weeks while it shows a sold page with other peoples domains below all the while I am losing other potential offers.

For me things have been getting worse in the last week or so, before that wasn't having this issue at UD much. Not sure what's changed but maybe connected to me doing make offer only there. Perhaps people are looking at 2/3 other names not thinking it's legally binding? Not sure but for me at least i'm now at the point I expect names not to close which is very bad.

 

[Optimal Names]

but sales can fail on any platform.. gd.. afternic.. undev.. I think we all had unpaid sales everywhere.. not just undev.

maybe it jut means buyers weren't serious to begin with. in which case if you start charging them upfront a deposit, they'll just never go through with it.

so instead of wasting potential leads.. and charging deposits.. I think its best to leave things as they are.. especially now that undev impleneted ability for seller cancel sale via panel any time he wants..

if ever undev starts charging people to make offer like domainagents, then that'd be the day I leave them.. however, if they want to make this option for some peoople .. and just add option to settings saying "charge buyer [amount] to make offer"... then why not.. they can even let sellers set amounts I guess.. I think its kinda fixed on domain agents..

since its not possible ot please all people.. its best to add options to settings for this stuff..

and in meantime, we can all just move our "sold" undev names to another lander.. bodis or whatnot.. so leads keep coming in if undev fails... of course. makeoffer only.

I agree its nice to have the ability to cancel the sale whenever we want BUT how long do we wait? I've had sales that have taken hours and I've had sales that take the buyer a month to get back and start payment proceedings. Tough decision as to when to cancel that sale though. True, could move the domain to another platform taking inquiries during the wait time to cover one self.

 

[creataweb]

I agree its nice to have the ability to cancel the sale whenever we want BUT how long do we wait? I've had sales that have taken hours and I've had sales that take the buyer a month to get back and start payment proceedings. Tough decision as to when to cancel that sale though. True, could move the domain to another platform taking inquiries during the wait time to cover one self.

The other problem is that the name is not put right back on sale, I had to wait about 5 days for my last incoming fake offer to be sorted and name re-listed AFTER the sale was deemed fake and canceled. That's too long for me tbh.

 

[alcy]

I agree its nice to have the ability to cancel the sale whenever we want BUT how long do we wait? I've had sales that have taken hours and I've had sales that take the buyer a month to get back and start payment proceedings. Tough decision as to when to cancel that sale though. True, could move the domain to another platform taking inquiries during the wait time to cover one self.

yeah.. I realized long while ago a lot of undev (or other platoforms.. this is not undev specific issue) sales never get paid.. so first thing I do when I make a sale anywhere is move to another lander.. no bin of course.. and often just bodis inquiry.. this allows me to get potential leads of intereat from other people.. in case a sale fails.

as for how long to wait before you cancel.. well.. that's the million dolar question isn't it.. u wait as long as you feel comfortable.

this is why few msgs up I asked @Undeveloped to implement a simple link loike sedo has that shows when buyer joined undev.. their sales acvitity measure bar... and country.

I find this helpful on sedo before I accept offer.. or when negotiating. its no guarantee of anything.. but I'll be sure to cancel a sale from a guy who joined in 2018 and has no sales.. then from a member from 2010 with buying actviity etc..

cheers

 

[creataweb]

I did the same thing on my last offer that didn't materialize @alcy - changed NS to another place and left it with MAKE OFFER only and will not change back. Epik is about the same in fees so will probably start using that MP on as many names as I can (plus they can hold my payouts for renewals and I can cash out the rest whenever I want.)

 

[Optimal Names]

On another note, has anyone read anything or been told anything about the new rental option?

 

[alcy]

On another note, has anyone read anything or been told anything about the new rental option?

its already there.. as per few posts back.

unless you are refering to news about how bin prices or installement options seem not showing up.. once you have leasing on. I hope this is fixed soon.. cause both instalment options and bins and makeoffers should show too.. when leasing is on.

 

[Optimal Names]

its already there.. as per few posts back.

unless you are refering to news about how bin prices or installement options seem not showing up.. once you have leasing on. I hope this is fixed soon.. cause both instalment options and bins and makeoffers should show too.. when leasing is on.

Yes, the latter.. I would like to see rental, lease, and BIN all on the same page or at least be given the option of which to display.. Would like to get @Undeveloped to provide some guidance...

 

[golan]

I like how Godaddy/Afternic does things...just like any other shop...You go in and you must pay be that thing is considered sold.

And how does that differ? I have two sales hanging now, from the same day 8 days ago, one on Undev another on GD, bot still not paid... What's your point?

 

[golan]

Totally support an idea voiced already by many - hitting BIN or reaching offer/counter agreement demands immediate like 10% non-refundable deposit. Which has to be paid in like 30 minutes, or in the case of the seller accepts an offer - 24 hours, assuming the buyer might be offline this exact time... Maybe 5% will work as well.

charging people to make offer

No no. Not to make offer, but to hit BIN, or just after the seller accepts the offer.

 

[DAN.COM]

@Undeveloped

I have suggestion, why dont you email customers about new hot domains?
this will increase your sales for sure. Brandbucket do something similar where they send weekly email about latest added domains.

But you need to collect emails of potential customers, you can collect emails from past domain offers through your market place (but you have to put check box for newsletter opt-in).

Hi Ostrados,

Thank you for the feedback! Appreciate it and noted.

is an undeveloped listing exclusive,like bb?

Hi CaboTower,

We aren't. Anyone can join Undeveloped and sell domains.

So far what I have observed from the reported sales on NP, only $XXX sales happens via undeveloped. Have not seen any big sale coming from there. Anyone else also feeling the same?

Hi Surender,

If we started publishing our sales, we'd be represented in the daily top 10 every day in terms of transaction value.

Often sellers that sell domains above $5k just don't want to share their sales so you'll only see the lower ones being reported.

I just noticed a Rental option, with a little "R" in the portfolio listing grid. Its a sortable element too. I set up one of my names "for rent" and set it to the price I'd want to rent it for. I also have a BIN (and lease) set for that domain. When I visit the name it only shows the monthly rental price that I set but not a BIN nor any indication that I'd be willing to sell it and "click here to see the price" anywhere. I'd think that would be good to see as well.

Hi AGAME,

We've rolled out domain rentals to only 20% of our user base as the feature is still in its early beta phase. The feature will be improved in the coming weeks.

One of the additions will be the option to set a purchase price while renting the name so your buyer at all time has the option to buy the domain if they wish to.

is there a way to builk edit the installment option ?

Hi Ecomslice,

In your settings, you can bulk enable and disable the option for all your domains.

There is no category on @namebio for Undeveloped.com reported sales. Any plans to add that?

But there are Undeveloped.com sales reported on DNJournal, supplied by Undeveloped.com, for example:
http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2018/20180124.htm


As I recall, I read somewhere on Undeveloped.com that sales are not published - can anyone find that exact text? Because it wasn't clear if that is a policy and whether that means sellers or buyers should not publish sales. When Undeveloped.com publish sales, as above, do they seek consent of buyer and seller?

Undeveloped's Privacy Policy may apply:
https://undeveloped.com/legal/privacy-policy


By comparison, as I recall on Sedo all sales by default are public unless you tell them to not publish your sales (there used to be an account wide setting where you could tell them not to publish all sales, I think now you have to contact them to request that, but it may have changed.)

Hi Carob,

I personally want to share all sales but the last time we did it at DNJournal we got so many negative responses from sellers that we stopped doing it. In the future, we'll make it an opt-in to share your sales so we could start publishing sales from sellers that give us their approval to share their sales.

However, the problem here is that it might look as if we don't sell many names simply because not all sellers, in that case, will publish their sales. So that could turn into negative advertising for the company.

In terms of sales volume we're now selling significantly more than Namejet and are getting close to sell as much as Uniregistry does.

Kind regards,
Reza

 

[DAN.COM]

Nice with the new rental feature. But as mentioned, there should be an option to buy also.

I wonder what it is a reasonable monthly rent? One percent of the BIN? Or less or more? I guess there is no standard for this.

Also not sure if Undeveloped has a minimum amount. Maybe their administration cannot support sending just a few dollars per month with bank fees and everything.

The buy option will be offered soon.

I would highly advice to not make paralels with real-estate for domain rentals. The average purchase price of a house is significantly higher and so requires a lower rental fee.

Since domains are significantly lower priced than houses the rental fee should be in balance and higher than for example 1% of the BIN price.

We'd advice rental prices in this region:

1: BIN less than $1,000 = $50 to $70 / Rental fee a month

2: BIN between $1,000 - $5,000 = $70 to $250 / Rental fee a month

3: BIN between $5,000 - $20,000 = $250 to $750 / Rental fee a month

And so on. In our pilot period, we set up rentals at even higher price ratios than mentioned above. Keep in mind that end-users will opt for renting your domain simply because they would like to take pressure of their cash flow.

Buying a domain for $1,000 in one go or renting it for $50 a month is significantly more affordable and doable for a very large group of potential end-users that currently wouldn't transact with you.

To conclude don't set too crazy high rental prices to scare away businesses, but also don't set the rental fee too low.

In the future, once we have more data at our hands we'll publish a domain rental index per extension to give you an impression of what's the norm and how rental prices increase/decrease over time.

Kind regards,

Reza

 

[Embrand]

The buy option will be offered soon.

I would highly advice to not make paralels with real-estate for domain rentals. The average purchase price of a house is significantly higher and so requires a lower rental fee.

Since domains are significantly lower priced than houses the rental fee should be in balance and higher than for example 1% of the BIN price.

We'd advice rental prices in this region:

1: BIN less than $1,000 = $50 to $70 / Rental fee a month

2: BIN between $1,000 - $5,000 = $70 to $250 / Rental fee a month

3: BIN between $5,000 - $20,000 = $250 to $750 / Rental fee a month

And so on. In our pilot period, we set up rentals at even higher price ratios than mentioned above. Keep in mind that end-users will opt for renting your domain simply because they would like to take pressure of their cash flow.

Buying a domain for $1,000 in one go or renting it for $50 a month is significantly more affordable and doable for a very large group of potential end-users that currently wouldn't transact with you.

To conclude don't set too crazy high rental prices to scare away businesses, but also don't set the rental fee too low.

In the future, once we have more data at our hands we'll publish a domain rental index per extension to give you an impression of what's the norm and how rental prices increase/decrease over time.

Kind regards,

Reza

Thanks, Reza. Great advice as usual and I look forward to trying it out. I am not sure who will want to rent when buying in installments in up to 24 months is available, but it will be interesting to see.

 

[DAN.COM]

From my experience it's worse at undeveloped than elsewhere as of this moment in time.
The legally biding contract is ignored by buyers they simply don't care about it and just ignore threats etc. knowing nothing to fear at the 3/4 figure level if they default. If buyers don't care about it then remove it entirely and just accept a ton of time wasters, will probably get more sales without it.
At SEDO for example barely had a fake buyer, same with afternic, there's something wrong here.

Hi Joro,

Of course you have more cancelations at Undeveloped than on the other platforms. Our marketplace is significantly differently designed than other marketplaces. Don't forget we used to use other marketplaces before we were fed up and started building our own marketplace.

The leads that get canceled you wouldn't even notice on other platforms just like the additional sales you have at Undeveloped because of the same mechanism. The mechanism that results in more non-serious buyers to slip through also makes sure you actually end up making more money at the end of the month.

As far as I'm informed, at Afternic you don't even get notified of a pending sale but only when the buyer pays you'll see a transaction forming. So you have no idea how many sales you're missing there because those buyers never complete the entire process.

I have said this a lot of times and will keep repeating it. Creating a low barrier for your buyers is the best setup available.

If we now build extra barriers and first ask buyers to create an account, verify the account etc before the buyer can place a bid, you'll lose a lot of sales. This is a proven fact. Some of our biggest sellers that switch to our marketplace for the first time, see an increase of xx% in sales and net revenue on a monthly basis. They will also see an increase in canceled transactions, but again that's accompanied by more sales and a nice low barrier for buyers to purchase a name.

Lastly, we offer free brokerage support for all transactions, we chase all buyers on Undeveloped to make sure all legit ones convert etc. I don't see other platforms offering this while maintaining such a low commission as Undeveloped.

Cancelations are simply part of this business, it is annoying but don't forget what your main goal is as seller: to generate the maximum potential revenue from your portfolio and Undeveloped is fully optimized for that.

So again, I get your frustrations guys but our low barrier setup is good for all of us. If we wanted to change it, we could do it easily and save costs while we're at it since we'd require less staff to chase buyers for you. But that's only going to cause fewer fake offers coming and fewer sales for all Undeveloped sellers and that should never be the case. We don't want to build another alternative marketplace, we're building the domain marketplace of the future.

Kind regards,

Reza

 

[joro001]

Hi Joro,

Of course you have more cancelations at Undeveloped than on the other platforms. Our marketplace is significantly differently designed than other marketplaces. Don't forget we used to use other marketplaces before we were fed up and started building our own marketplace.

The leads that get canceled you wouldn't even notice on other platforms just like the additional sales you have at Undeveloped because of the same mechanism. The mechanism that results in more non-serious buyers to slip through also makes sure you actually end up making more money at the end of the month.

As far as I'm informed, at Afternic you don't even get notified of a pending sale but only when the buyer pays you'll see a transaction forming. So you have no idea how many sales you're missing there because those buyers never complete the entire process.

I have said this a lot of times and will keep repeating it. Creating a low barrier for your buyers is the best setup available.

If we now build extra barriers and first ask buyers to create an account, verify the account etc before the buyer can place a bid, you'll lose a lot of sales. This is a proven fact. Some of our biggest sellers that switch to our marketplace for the first time, see an increase of xx% in sales and net revenue on a monthly basis. They will also see an increase in canceled transactions, but again that's accompanied by more sales and a nice low barrier for buyers to purchase a name.

Lastly, we offer free brokerage support for all transactions, we chase all buyers on Undeveloped to make sure all legit ones convert etc. I don't see other platforms offering this while maintaining such a low commission as Undeveloped.

Cancelations are simply part of this business, it is annoying but don't forget what your main goal is as seller: to generate the maximum potential revenue from your portfolio and Undeveloped is fully optimized for that.

So again, I get your frustrations guys but our low barrier setup is good for all of us. If we wanted to change it, we could do it easily and save costs while we're at it since we'd require less staff to chase buyers for you. But that's only going to cause fewer fake offers coming and fewer sales for all Undeveloped sellers and that should never be the case. We don't want to build another alternative marketplace, we're building the domain marketplace of the future.

Kind regards,

Reza

Okay fine.
It looks like i've had 3 in around a week waste my time which is crazy. Why do you think it's getting worse?

Can you scrap the useless legally binding contract which buyers couldn't care less about and aren't afraid of defaulting on. It serves no one and will only increase friction when it's not needed. I.e. could put off people who are interested but don't want to see that.

 

[Millionaire]

If we started publishing our sales, we'd be represented in the daily top 10 every day in terms of transaction value.

Often sellers that sell domains above $5k just don't want to share their sales so you'll only see the lower ones being reported.

Hi Reza
Thanks for taking time to respond. I have already shifted my all domains to undeveloped & hope we will do a sale together