Advice

Yesterday, I received an email from someone looking to sell a domain name that I don’t believe has value. Put another way, I wouldn’t hand register the domain name with your credit card, let alone pay someone a premium to buy it. I’ve been pretty busy lately, so I did not reply to the email. This morning, I received a sassy message from the same person telling me they expected to receive an answer from me and was upset that I did not reply.

A prospective buyer is under no obligation to respond to an unsolicited domain name sales email. Just like I am not obligated to reply to a spam phone call or a marketing letter in the mail, I do not need to reply to an unsolicited domain name sales email. Even when a prospective buyer requests a price, they are under no obligation to follow up if they do not wish to do so. It seems silly to have to write this, but sometimes something that seems like common sense to me may not be common sense to everyone.

I read AbdulBasit Makrani’s thoughts about payment plans on NamePros, as well as the commentary added by others. I thought I would share a couple of additional pieces of advice that I think could be helpful based on my own experiences.

I have done somewhere around 10+/- deals using payment plans. For all of them except for one, I used either Escrow.com, DAN.com, or John Berryhill for the escrow / holding service. There are other companies that offer payment plan deal facilitation, but I have not used any other services. Based on my experiences, there are two things I would suggest – use a third party provider to facilitate the deal and do your best to ensure all of the fees are covered with the first payment.

Payment plans can be beneficial for several reasons. The buyer will be able to purchase a domain name that might not be affordable without a payment plan, and if they buyer fails to make payment in full, the seller keeps the payments and gets the domain name back. Aside from not getting paid in full upfront, I don’t see many drawbacks that can’t be worked out in the payment plan agreement.

Although I do not report my own sales, I appreciate when other investors and companies share their sales. Some of the benefits I get out of seeing other people’s sales include the following insight:

• Types of domain names that are selling
• Who is buying domain names
• Where domain names are selling (venues/landers)
• Pricing strategy
• Keywords that are selling and the value of comparable domain names

I like the idea of operating my own landing pages. For better or worse, I have autonomy over the exact design of my landing pages, and I can test pretty much anything. I can change the colors, I can change the text, I can add or subtract form fields, I can enhance or remove the phone number. With my own landing pages, I can pretty much do whatever I want, as long as I can either do it on my own or pay a designer to do it for me.

There are some costs to doing this, beyond the actual cost of paying a designer to make changes on my behalf. Lost leads is an incalculable cost, and I want to share a recent experience.