Afternic

I recently sold a domain name I owned for several years after an email discussion with the buyer. During our negotiation, at least three people from the buyer’s side were involved in the discussion. Once we agreed on a price, I wasn’t sure whose email address to use for the transaction and had a feeling it could be someone else entirely.

Because of the relatively low value of the deal (under $5k), I decided to use Dan.com for the transaction. In my experience, buyers have had few difficulties with payment, and Dan support works with the buyer to facilitate the domain transfer instead of having to do that myself. Despite a higher cost % vs. escrow, I have found there to be fewer speed bumps.

Because it was unclear who would be managing the transaction, I did not do the traditional lead import at Dan.com. Instead, I opted to get a checkout link via Afternic. Since Afternic and Dan both offer the same 5% transaction fee on imported leads, it was essentially the same cost and I figured I would see how the checkout link works.

From the outset, I will tell you that I don’t have statistically significant data that would offer true insights about price testing and/or price sensitivity. I think regularly changing and testing your prices could prove helpful in selling domain names.

I have many hundreds of inventory-quality domain names that have historically been priced at just shy of $1,000 – either $999, $997, $988, or something else very close. I recently updated the prices of just about every name I own that had a price of $2,000 or less to ~$2,500. I did this on Dan.com and Afternic. My rationale was from insights shared by Darpan Munjal and Michael Sumner.

I just learned the valuable TP.com domain name was sold in February of this year. TP.com was listed for sale via Afternic with an asking price of $1.4 million. The domain name was sold for $1,200,000 via Afternic. The sale was reported to me by the seller, an industry colleague I have known for many years who wishes to not be named.

Although the Whois record for TP.com is private, the buyer of TP.com appears to be a company called Teleperformance. This company is publicly traded on the Paris Stock Exchange under the TEP ticker symbol. Teleperformance has a market capitalization approaching 5.7 Billion EUR. At the time of publication, TP.com is forwarding to the Teleperformance.com website.