More exposure is better, but it’s a question of whether it’s worth your time.
Any domain sales platform can sell your domains if you point your domains to their for-sale landers. But can they deliver sales even if you don’t?
The answer is yes. The bigger question is: is it worth your time?
Let’s dig in.
Afternic and Sedo are the longest-running major marketplaces in the business. They sell domains in a few ways:
- Someone searches in their network of partners (primarily registrars) for your domains.
- Someone types in your domain if it’s parked on their platform.
- In the case of Sedo, someone searches on their marketplace. Afternic no longer has a search feature.
The registrar networks are by far the most powerful.
I’m not entirely sure of the overlap between Afternic and Sedo partners. Some are obvious, such as GoDaddy being exclusive to Afternic.
Regardless, both can get your domains in front of buyers at the point they search for domains. For maximum exposure at these partners, you’ll need to price your domains.
For years, my strategy has been to list with Buy Now prices on Afternic and list with Make Offer on Sedo. This way, I don’t have to enter prices on both platforms. I just upload my list of domains to Sedo once or twice a year to keep it relatively fresh. I recognize this means Sedo doesn’t give me as much exposure through its network.
From time to time, I receive offers on domains listed on Sedo that are also available on Afternic. Perhaps someone searched for the domain on the Sedo marketplace. Or maybe a registrar partner showed the make offer domain. And some buyers would like to negotiate directly through Sedo rather than an Afternic broker.
For me personally, it makes sense to list on Sedo, but I don’t bother with adding prices and only update the inventory a couple of times a year.
Now, there’s the Spaceship question.
Spaceship is a sister registrar to Namecheap, which is the second-largest domain registrar behind GoDaddy. Spaceship’s SellerHub lets you list domains and get them in the search path on Namecheap.
Currently, you can also get in that search path if you have your domains priced on Afternic or Sedo. And for now, the integration with Afternic and Sedo is actually a bit better for Namecheap customers than the Spaceship listings; for the latter, customers are redirected to Spaceship to make the purchase.
However, there are a couple of benefits I can see to listing your domains on SellerHub even if you don’t park them there.
First, you pay only a 5% commission if your domain sells through SellerHub rather than Afternic/Sedo, which charge at least 15%/20%.
Second, I believe Namecheap is working on showing non-exact match searches in its search path, which could surface names even when someone doesn’t search for the exact domain.
And a future benefit: Spaceship plans to remove Afternic and Sedo eventually.
So is it worth adding your domains to Spaceship SellerHub today?
Maybe. At least one domain investor sold a domain there that was also listed on Afternic, even though the domain didn’t point to Spaceship.
Managing domains on multiple platforms can be a pain, especially if you price them. If you update your price in one place, you need to do it in the other.
SellerHub gives you the option of just setting domains to Make Offer, but I’m not sure how that will perform compared to setting a price.
Today, I decided to upload my domains with prices to SellerHub. I downloaded my portfolio with pricing from Afternic and added it through the SellerHub bulk add tool.
Whether or not I continue to list on Spaceship depends on whether it drives any sales.
Source: https://domainnamewire.com/
