For future reference, here it is.
I would like to give a recap of some of the things we have been working on this past year as I think by reading this thread some things get overlooked and it may seem as if we are not moving forward unless you take a step back and look at the big picture. We have been doing some really cool thing this year.
We have added many more registrars to the Afternic network which is resulting in more opportunities for your domains to be seen and purchased by end users around the world. We have had a pretty significant increase in registrar partners focused in Asia. That has been exciting because there is renewed demand there in "non-chip" domains as Chinese investors who purchased chip domains were exposed to Western Premium names as well. We also expanded the number of partners non fast transfer domains are listed for sale.
We have also expanded significantly in Europe over the past year in terms of partners as well as local presence and language support. This enables us to sell more of your domains to end users in Europe with local sales representatives calling and emailing the buyers in their own language and time zone.
We also added a local support team which has helped reduce response times for support inquiries and helped to smooth out the sales process.
We also worked on expanding the partnerships with registrars to bring in more expired domain name inventory from third parties. This gives you a better chance to acquire good investment domains in one place and then easily list them for sale on Afternic's expanded network to get the names maximum exposure for sales.
We released a new beta view for managing domains in the domain control center that is more bulk focused and also allows direct integration into Afternic from within your GoDaddy domain view. You can list and edit domains for sale within GoDaddy’s domain management screen.
The new payment system we are releasing has taken a lot of development resources, but this is enabling us to make more exciting changes in the future. We pay a lot of people money daily and there were various ways to do that, think affiliates, resellers, parking at three different parking companies we run, domain sales via GoDaddy and Afternic, etc. What we are doing is getting all the various payment channels piped into one system that goes through a third party which is enabled to pay more ways than we can easily do. International payments via local banks in local currency for instance.
This is a pretty big undertaking to redo the various payment platforms and tie them into one place but in the end the goal is to more easily pay you for all your various payments in one place and to do it faster than we have previously been able to do. This is the ultimate goal. There are some issues that are popping up short term as we move towards a better/faster payment system, but this will ultimately allow us to speed up payments down the road.
Paying through a third party will allow our developers to have more time freed up to focus on other important projects in the future which will help us more rapidly address things that will further improve the platform.
We are working on continuing to improve the support received. We have hired additional people and are restructuring the teams internally to make sure they are able to better leverage the various strengths we have. This has been underway for a few months and will continue into the next year as we continue to hire and re-align various teams to better respond to our customers.
Most recently we hired and trained a new support team for Europe that works with the current Aftermarket teams to help strengthen the overall support experience. We have seen some exciting results in the past month as the average response time has decreased significantly and the hours advanced Aftermarket support is available to the general support has expanded.
As far as ownership verification and fast transfer etc. We have had to make some changes due to GDPR (European law which impacted certain WHOIS information). We have released changes to the way GoDaddy auctions are listed and verified, based on txt records now instead of WHOIS. This has led to greater efficiency and better real time verification of listings, especially when ownership recently changed for a domain.
We are planning on expanding this to Afternic listings in the future. This should help clear up a common complaint which is, newly acquired domains being listed by the previous owner on Afternic require a contact with support to clear up. This should not happen once this release is completed.
We also released in Beta an appraisal tool which has been helpful for various aspects of domain investing. One of the most significant impacts has been getting end users to see the value of a domain as more than a registration fee.
We have made significant investments in Afternic and GoDaddy's Aftermarket throughout the past year and the net result has been more sales for our customers and better opportunities to purchase domain names via the expiry auction. We have seen increased Aftermarket purchases as buyers are able to more easily explain why a domain is valuable to their partners, boss, or board when deciding to buy a premium domain.
I know we have a lot of other work to do but I wanted to share some of the recent projects we have been working on to let you know we have been investing in the Aftermarket platform as a whole and that there have been good results overall. Ultimately, we are working to reduce friction points for buyers and sellers and we understand from a seller standpoint there are some things that still need to be worked on, better service, faster smoother payments, and bulk tools. We are working towards those things in addition to expanding sales opportunities for sellers and inventory opportunities for buyers.
