OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
I have this same question for years. How is shopping around for a domain going to help you? Help you get it cheaper that is…
I am not talking about different domains. I am talking about this one domain a buyer wants and the seller is accepting offers and is negotiating.
I do understand that a few buyers mistakenly think that domains are sold by registrars the same way unregistered domains are sold so they try to shop around. New gTLDs didn’t help with that as you might actually get a slightly better deal on different registrars. (I am not talking about $1 or $2 here. I am talking for New gTLDs that sell for a big premium initial price and then have normal renewals rates.)
And I know that some sellers have different BIN prices on different platforms. e.g. A domain sold for $1,000 at the Afternic network can have a $900 BIN price on a domain lander. That is mostly because of the different fees charged by different platform. Or the seller forgot to update a BIN price… 🙂
Here is what happened…
I am mostly talking here about buyers that pay a service that contacts domain owners directly and makes negotiations for the domain purchase.
I got one such offer a few days ago via Domain Agents. The buyer made a $199 offer and I countered with $2,799. The buyer didn’t even countered and canceled the negotiations. He/she essentially wasted the $19.95 paid to start negotiations.
On the next day I got an email from GoDaddy’s domainbuy service asking me for a quote for that same domain. I quoted the same price. Haven’t heard back.
So how did shopping around for this domain helped the buyer?
Not only he/she wasted the Domain Agents fee and not negotiated with me at all but also then paid the much higher $69.99 fee GoDaddy DomainBuy fee to essentially do the same thing and get the same quote.
And the best part is that they moved from a cheaper service to a more expensive service so the domain will actually cost more to them!
Domain Agents charges the buyer for the Escrow fees and a 10% commission where GoDaddy charges the buyer with a 20% fee.
Go figure…
I have seen the same happening many times.
I believe it’s because people really don’t know how secondary domain market works.
Many newbies are realizing that …holy sh**&^ I need a website to get my business running but before I get my website up, I need a domain name and wtf is a domain name. That why they are desperate to seek any paying services when they can do it for free . It is called desperation and knowledge.
It is called the Placebo self inner guilty syndrome.
People pays for a service thinking that you will get a better service.
Why would someone pays $$ to some damn money hungry blogger to advertise your domain when you can get it for free?
Most of the bloggers are just talking about their own domains they want to sell…self hawking–hey, it is called abuse of power and they do not want to approve your comments with your domains.-
May be the such buyers think that going with major services like GoDaddy will give them discounted price as their brokers are well trained and professional to get the seller bring the price down. That’s totally wrong thinking if that’s the case from buyer’s point of view.
I doubt they even know what a domain broker is.
People are stupid… 🤦🏽♂️
I think that the buyer does not know about the domain market and genuinely thought the domain could be bought for (let’s say) $1,000.
So after being surprised with the $2,799 counter, they began to suspect the first broker had inflated the price by say $1,799 for their own profit. They wrongly suspected the broker had added a huge “commission” to the real price.
So they hired a second broker in the belief that they would receive a much lower quote, only to be surprised that $2,799 is the real price after all.
The problem is that some buyers are surprised at any quote. $250k or $25k or $2.5k. $2,799 was very cheap for any pre-owned domain.
The buyer is not aware of premium domain names in general. From where I stand the buyer is surely gonna be back to buy this premium domain name. Keep your fingers crossed and hold on tight to this premium name. Good luck!