Domain Magnate

Many newbie domainers go on a buying spree excited by all the reports of high sales and opportunities presented in the industry. But as you know high prices fetched by individual sales don’t always show the market price and finding end users may turn out to be much more complicated.

By selling, or at least trying to sell a few domains once in a while you can get a better understanding of the market and current prices. Even if you are a buyer, and planning to invest in a few good domains to hold them for a long time, listing them for offers on a domaining forum can you get a good idea of the market price. This can also be useful if you need to sell the domains quick to raise funds - you’d already know what price you can expect for a quick sale.

Hey all,

I sell domains through forums quite frequently and always try to improve my sales threads and techniques, so I thought I’d share a few tips here in hopes that it will be useful. This post will mostly contain general tips, for more specific advice watch for the next posts in the series.

Include your terms.

This is quite important to prevent any disputes, or misunderstandings. Also to protect yourself from scammers and save time. I usually include something like this at the beginning of my sales threads:

- All prices are temporary and sale may end without prior notice
- Payments by bank wire, escrow, paypal (masspay, or add 4%), moneybookers, e-gold - all fees paid by the buyer, payment must be processed within 2 days.
- Bulk discounts are possible only if you buy 3 or more domains domains, pm for details.
- Please use who.is/domain.com to check registrar and expiry dates where not listed. All names should have at least 2 months till expiration read more »

An interesting series of posts by Rick here:

What makes a domain sellable?
What makes a domain sellable part 2
What makes a domain sellable, part 3
What makes a domain sellable, part 4

Some good tips there and I can agree with most. Domains with clear and obvious use are much easier to sell. They are however harder to find at good prices.

Short domains may have less possible development ideas, but they are a great collectible item which value will only go up.

Change Your Domain Details Right After Buying

We all buy and sell domains on a daily basis and frequently the domains are not updated after the purchase. Buyer forgets or puts off changing the new owner information, or dns, thus still allowing the previous owner to earn the parking revenue. As strange as it may sound, but this situation is very common and frequently even leads to conflicts and losses, for example then a domainer realizes he doesn’t control the domain he purchased because he didn’t change the whois and the domain expired.

Always take this as a rule: right after you buy a domain first thing you do is change contact details (some registrars don’t do that for you automatically after the push, like Dotster, for example), change dns and add the domain to your parking accounts and to your domains list. Keep tracks of all your purchases and sales.

Do it now, thank me later

I’m preparing to unload a part of my portfolio and I was recently wondering where is the best place to auction them.

While the two main venues are sedo and snanames, to my surprise the replies varied.

Those in favor of sedo are saying that:

• sedo has larger audience
• sedo’s fees are lower - indeed snapnames charges up to 20%, while at sedo it’s only 10% read more »