My Afternic Lead Center is full of Stalled, Qualifying, Confused, and Unknown leads. As a domain investor, this is pretty confusing and slightly frustrating. I don’t blame Afternic brokers for this because I have become familiar with how their platform works, but I do think Afternic and GoDaddy should better educate its sellers on the brokerage process.

When a prospective buyer submits an offer or inquiry, I am pretty certain they quickly receive an automated email with information about the domain name and a broker contact. The Afternic broker will follow up various times via email and a phone call if they have the correct phone number. Afternic brokers earn a living on commissions, so they have a vested interest in selling domain names.

I enabled Afternic’s self-brokerage option as soon as I heard it went live. I immediately tested it out with one of my own domain names so I could see how the platform works as a buyer and as a seller. Before I got started, I ran into an issue, and I couldn’t tell if it was a feature or a bug. James Iles confirmed to me that it this difference is intentional.

When sellers have the self-brokerage option disabled, prospective buyers will be shown a form to submit an offer. On the form, they need to provide their name, email address, and phone number. There are also a few pop-up questions that appear after submitting the form. When sellers have self-brokerage enabled, prospective buyers who wish to submit an offer will need to sign-in to a GoDaddy account to proceed or create a new GoDaddy account. You can have a look at the difference here:

I am sure one of the most popular requests of GoDaddy is the ability to manage inbound purchase inquiries and offers for domain names listed for sale via Afternic. This is no surprise considering this was a major selling point of two companies GoDaddy acquired – Dan.com and Uniregistry.

Afternic just announced self-brokerage capabilities have been enabled for approximately 100,000 people who are members of GoDaddy’s Discount Domain Club’s top tier. I can see this has been enabled in my account, and I am going to test the platform to see how it works for a buyer and seller to get a feel for how it works, how it looks, and the timing of inquiries and responses.

Notably, the sale commission for a successful transaction is the same percentage as it would be if a GoDaddy/Afternic broker were negotiating on behalf of the owner. The advantage (or disadvantage depending on your perspective) is the domain registrant can respond and negotiate in their own style and at their own pace.