OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
I have no idea how many times I have written about GoDaddy and their remarkable incompetence.
So once again here it is. This is what happened:
A buyer told me he saw one of my domain names for sale for $6,000 at Domain Tools/ Afternic. So he offered me $5,000.
I told him the price is $75,000 and that this is the Buy-It-Now price at Afternic for about a year now.
So I went and checked whois for my domain name at Domain Tools and saw this:
If you click on the link it takes you to the Afternic checkout that shows my BIN price:
That $6,000 price sure did sound familiar to me so I logged into my GoDaddy (NOT AFTERNIC that only has the BIN price listed) account.
I have the same domain name listed for sale at GoDaddy with a minimum offer price of $6,000 and no BIN!
So…
The code that Domain Tools is using as a GoDaddy/Afternic partner to display domain name prices is pulling the minimum offer from GoDaddy and displaying it incorrectly as the domain BIN price. Then if you click on the link the redirect takes you to the Afternic checkout showing the correct price. If you don’t click on the link then you will never see the real BIN price.
Why on earth is this happening???
I even tried entering the same domain name at GoDaddy and it displays the correct price (syndicated from Afternic). Tried some other registrar partners (like Namecheap) and got the correct price as well.
Are all non-registrar partners like Domain Tools displaying incorrect prices? Will you (ever) fix this GoDaddy?
(And yes I still use GoDaddy for some of my domains because for example Afternic will not syndicate all domain names!)
Is any single person responsible for this utter mess we are experiencing in GoDaddy for years?
Will GoDaddy ever fix this inexplicable disaster that we have to work with every single day?
I have been trying for almost a year to add all my priced domains at Afternic and GoDaddy. After hundreds of emails back and forth I have still not successfully added ALL my domains. Every extension or subset of domains has some different problem. This is a labyrinth of bad code, bugs, incompetence and poor management. Problems keeps arising… Some GoDaddy reps only reply to emails once per day… If ever… And this is how GoDaddy works… Total incompetence.
THIS IS A F*CKING DISASTER!!!
And guess what happens when a company sees a domain name for sale at $6,000, then the company has a meeting and decides to purchase the domain and then you tell them the domain is $75,000!!! You lose the damn sale! This is what happens!
I already commented about this a few times.. It is a mess. Big mess.. The connection between Uni, Afternic and Godaddy is not working well. Domains have sometimes high minimum prices and sometimes low at Godaddy… I cant seem to figure it out. It is a mess. Sometimes it seems that there is a buy it now price at godaddy but when you actually click to buy it you see that there is a minimum price too. Its a shame as some wont bother clicking and wont see at all this option.
That was due to the new BETA Afternic console. Noticed it right off the bat.
This has been happening for years… I just did not investigate it properly.
What I did was I deleted all my domains in my Sedo, UNI,Afternic and GD listing and then wait for 48hrs and add back the domains.
I completely deleted my account at Sedo,Uni…
I removed all domains in BIN from Godaddy months ago because they interfered with those from Afternic, now I only have domains in BIN in Afternic and everything like that Godaddy has the same power over Afternic and Uni, these last two I think that next year everything will return to just be Godaddy.
I kicked GoDaddy to the curb years ago, the culture of a company comes from the founder, on paper he seemed an admirable person, served in Marines, Purple Heart, graduating magna cum laude and a door kicker attitude.
He used hot girlie pics and even in those days they seemed distasteful
Parsons said. “I told the ad agency, I want a really well-endowed, good-looking gal in a tight T-shirt, with our name right across her breasts.”
What did it for me was when I saw him share video of him killing Elephant for sport and bragging about it. Whilst he is no longer CEO or Chairman, last I looked he was biggest shareholder but not looked for a while. He is a Billionaire and part of The GIving Pledge but I think the culture remains at GoDaddy.
What came over in that culture in my experience was that GoDaddy staff appeared to be motivated to stitch up customers, they also had all these extra charges left right and centre.
Years ago they had this little trick, when you put a domain transfer request in they would ask you to make sure the address was 100% accurate and to edit it just to make sure so they could see. They would then say the ICANN 60 day rule applied (in those days you could not opt out). There was nothing wrong with the address, the GoDaddy rep was clearly just trying to keep it past the renew date and he was not the only one.
I bought and sold thousands of domains many of them via GoDaddy, after the Elephant thing I moved everything, it took me months, but I felt cleaner afterwards.
I lost count of the number of people I persuaded to dump them, I even gave free hosting and used my domain registrar account discounts to get them a better deal, just to get them away.
I stopped used Sedo because they would not let me exclude GoDaddy, we all get time wasted with low ball offers and spam, but 90% of mine came from GoDaddy. Their staff were diabolical when involved, they were all interested in chasing me to accept ridiculous offers, but did not really help both sides to achieve a deal.
So when I got a low ball offer from a GoDaddy customer I would respond with a 7 figure offer just to tell them to fuck off.
There are no companies I can think of in other industries where I feel so strongly about, I would not trust GoDaddy with anything.
My advice to anyone in domaining just get out of anything GoDaddy, the peace of mind will be a refreshing change.
Konstantinos, you may not have had that silly 6k offer without GoDaddy but expectation is reputation and now that buyer may bad mouth you to others in his circles.
Hi Neal – I have been eager to ditch Godaddy for quite some time, for many of the same reasons you outlined. I just wasn’t sure where to go. Who do you use? I have a few hundred domains at Fabulous.com and Namecheap.com…and a handful at Name.com and Dynadot.com. Any thoughts on these guys?