The Afternic / GoDaddy / DomainTools domain name pricing problem is now fixed

Last month I wrote about a disastrous mixup with GoDaddy and Afternic domain name pricing at Domain Tools.

Generally, when you do a whois search at Domain Tools and the domain name is listed for sale at Afternic then Domain Tools displays the price of that domain name and a button/link to purchase the domain name directly at Afternic.

This feature displayed the wrong price if the domain name was also listed with GoDaddy. It would display the minimum offer price (???) from GoDaddy instead of the actual BIN price from Afternic.

Paul Nicks from GoDaddy contacted me for more details and it turns out that Domain Tools had the wrong API implementation. About 2 weeks later they fixed it and BIN prices from Afternic are now displayed correctly at the Domain Tools whois page.

One last thing.

This was not 100% a DomainTools problem. When you are giving access to your API like GoDaddy does then you should make sure the API is used correctly and that usage will not hurt your business (and your customer’s business). GoDaddy once again failed to do that.

I guess we will never find out how many domain name sales were lost because of this problem.