OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
DAN 2.0 went live today with a lot of changes.
Frank Koelewijn, Head of Brand & Design, said today:
“We started Dan with a mission to empower entrepreneurs and make the domain world a better, more transparent place. We are pioneering as the partner of entrepreneurs, stakeholders, and the rest of the industry to name, build and grow their business.
Today we are announcing the evolution of our brand, a major step towards empowering everyone to build towards their goals. Our brand is growing to incorporate an inspiring visual identity that strengthens our mission and complements the simplicity of our tools.
We’re still the same Dan, just with more space to grow.”
Here is what Dan shared today:
What’s changed and what hasn’t
We’ve updated our logo, wordmark, typeface, colours, and imagery like illustrations. We’ve also evolved from “DAN.COM” to “Dan.com” with just a capital D. Our name began as a metaphor: Domain Automation Network. These days we do focus more on becoming the partner of entrepreneurs, stakeholders, and the rest of the industry, and our name stands for more than just automation.
Aside from new colours and looking more fresh, we want to make sure the transition towards your new workflow at Dan will go gradually instead of a massive change once. A couple of highlights for this update:
For Sale pages
- We have streamlined the buying options for the For Sale Pages;
- All For Sale Pages have been optimized for mobile purchases;
- We’ve given our ‘Standard For Sale Page’ more options. From now on you can choose any colour for your header background. And you’re also able to have a predefined colour overlay for your (animated) images;
- We’ve designed a new For Sale Page template. This version is a more brand-able and informative option for portfolio holders. You can even create your own brand card!;
Customer Area update
- Our Customer Area has a more clear way of navigating;
- Our Transaction window has been updated to make it better readable;
- Our settings are updated to clarify your selection.
Other updates
- We’ve put extra emphasis on our processes to become a more transparent and trustworthy marketplace. To achieve this we’ve completely redesigned our public pages from scratch;
- We have improved our checkout process;
There’s more to come
From early on, we were determined to comprehensively roll out this new brand. It’s not the Dan way to just slap a new logo on the website and tweak the colours; if a rebrand is to be successful, it needs full commitment.
So, the past few months we’ve been working hard to apply the brand system to every facet of our company and products. And after a lot of research and listening to your needs, we have some massive product updates in the pipeline, which we’ll add continuously within the next months. A couple of feature highlights:
- Optional premium brokerage by MediaOptions;
- Add categories & categories settings to keep easily track of your domain names;
- Offering fully integrated registrar services;
- Easily bulk edit your domain names settings;
- Payoneer integration for payouts;
- Account balances;
- Increase prices in percentages or by a certain amount;
- Advanced filters for your domain overview;
- And more to come.
Dan’s Future Customer Area
I really think the totally forgot to add a second input that says “sold along with” or “Second name” or “Bundled name” below the “name” field when listing or editing. The reason is that they would be the only company to do it. This would address the problem where a seller lists example.com but would like to sell it along with examples.com or examples.net
Being around long enough, they should know that such listings are common and add value to both buyers and sellers.
I thought it was just a lick of paint but desiign (if we can call it that) seems worse to me.
Who is DAN, sorry Dan aiming at, small guys starting out, domain investors or what?
I do not like the search facility, results that have a lease and sales price cause the domain name to wrap around in the middle of the TLD so you get onlinedomain.c
om
There is far too much white space, a common design error where the developers are given screens that are huge when the most used at 15″ laptops, or they use a bloody framework designed for ipads, just madness. Anyone who understands websites that SELL knows what you have “above the fold” is critical, you should not have to scroll, reveal and you do not want any of these widget shits blocking your content.
The search screen only shows 10 domains per page and rather than scrolling there are 137 pages to click through on 3 letter domains for example. Talk about a reason to leave a site.
I tried the Transaction Explore and it did nothing, just as well because I really do not want DAN or Dan telling people my domain has been rented, this is a commercially sensitive matter to buyer and seller, not to be exploited by DAN.
The site says
Purchase, rent or lease a domain Done! On average the domain is yours in 24 hours!
Well not exactly, if a seller decides to lease purchase a domain the domain becomes OWNED by DaN not the buyer, it could be 5 years not 24 hours before it is yours. One only has to look at Trustpilot to see how many people do not like the Dan model. Granted there are a some people who are taking their anger of the domain owning process out on dAN but looking at the screwups I could see a risk of losing your domain.
If DaN goes bust one day an awful lot of people could lose their domain.
I can see a risk of this because there are a few issues I can see about the operation which I am investigating as I feel they breach some regulations.
Then we come to the Lease Purchase model
daN are taking a whopping 50% of your rental income over a 5 year lease AND hitting you for 9% of sale price the only solace they can offer is that if the transaction fails you do get to keep the rentals to date, BUT YOU DO NOT GET YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS towards the 9% back even though they failed to complete the sale.
So you sell a domain for $120,000 on lease purchase over 5 years, but the deal fails after three months, DAN charge 9% over the 60 months, so after the 3 months this amounts to $540, the lease charge is 30% so lease interest payments are $600 per month, or $1800. The domain has to be given back to you, but you do not get to keep the $1800, no dAn grabs $900 of that $1800, so for a failed sale you get $900 and Dan get $1440.
Dan being such wonderful people say “we let you keep the installments of $7,800 as if it was not your damn domain” as if they are doing you a favour!
If you allow this installment payment model there is no interest for the first 12 months, but again you will still be hit for the 9% failed sale fee.
So here is my approach, I will not agree to the lease rental model I will use Dan and or other site as a listing service, they will come to my sites and see a sales page that offers them a sale or rental model according to MY terms and whether it be Dan or Sedo or whoever, I get 100% of any interest charge, I pay the fee for the sale which I pass on the buyer.
Finally from a Marketing point of view I think Dan’s restrictive sales page is rubbish, they say it helps optimise, well that is BS, when did you EVER find a domain for sale on the first page of Google.
So again I can resolve this by knocking up a website that I can transfer from site to site in a CMS and just change the variables.
Dan does not rank for any of the Domain for sale keywords but their competitors DO, so what is this BS about you are paying for the marketing or for the platform. I did a search and they did not appear on the first 7 pages (could be worse but I gave up after page 7 as nobody goes that deep).
So to be honest I can’t see what all the hype is about daN, they have nothing without our domains and if a potential buyer does happen across their site and get the awful chat bot, it will be email capture most of the time.
Who are the biggest competitors of Dan?
Why have you not posted my experience of using Dan
It was totally factual and confirmed by chat from their website.
So were you paid to promote this company, if so you should say so.
Can you please explain? I might have missed something…
Konstantinos
I tired to post it again and it gave message that it was a duplicate post, so please check your moderation queue and approve the post.