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.
In the weeks since I made that change, I did not have a BIN sale at that price point. I did have 2 sales for just shy of $2,000 from buyers who reached out directly to negotiate. With such a small data set, I can’t say what impact the price changes had on those deals.
About a week ago, I stared the task of reverting many of the prices back to ~$1,000. As much as it’s a buzzkill to get a Dan.com or Afternic email for a small sale, it’s an even bigger buzzkill to not get any sale emails. Since changing the prices back, I’ve closed two BIN sales for $997 – one on Dan and the other on Afternic.
I have no real way of knowing whether if buyers were eyeing these domain names and monitoring prices. I can’t say whether they would have paid $2,500 or not had I kept the prices the same. That’s one downside of maintaining a fairly small portfolio of fewer than 2,000 domain names. Sometimes I am flying blind.
I am going to try to find a way to make it easier to changes prices en masse. I plan to reach out to Dan.com and Afternic to get a list of my inventory priced below $2,000 and see if I can make automated submissions to regularly update the prices via spreadsheet. Perhaps someone who passed on a name at $997 will feel badly about not buying it when the price goes up, but will grab it quickly when the price reverts. The only way to know for sure is to keep testing.
That the beauty of domaining…
It is not static,it is always dynamic
My Best stress free hobby and earning big bucks
Hi Elliot, what is a good rule of thumb on how often should we change the price?
I do not have enough data to give any advice on that. My sales could be random and have nothing to do with price changes. I wanted to share what I experienced though.
Test, test, test, and when you’re done, go back and test some more.