GDPR Making It Harder to Research Inbound Offers

A couple of weeks ago, I closed a deal with a buyer who resides in the UK. The domain name I sold was not particularly valuable, but I still like to do some research on the buyer and prospective usage of the domain name before agreeing to a deal.

Shortly after the offer was submitted via my landing page, I could not find a whole lot of information about the buyer. I did several Google searches for the buyer’s name and the email address. Unfortunately, the name was fairly common and the email address did not yield much helpful information. I also searched similar domain names to see

The buyer and I ended up agreeing to a deal that was slightly below the listed asking price, so it worked out in the end because there was no commission involved. The deal closed and all was fine.

Yesterday afternoon, I was curious to see if the domain name was being put to use yet. Generally, I am able to get more information about the planned usage of the domain name prior to a deal closing but that wasn’t the case with this particular domain name. When I visited the landing page, I saw a “coming soon” landing page which referenced the plural domain name, which I did not own. The plural domain name appears to be owned by the same person or company who bought my domain name. I say “appears” because the Whois details are redacted due to GDPR.

In this particular case, the price and subsequent deal would not have changed even if I could see the Whois record of the other domain name. I think the price was fair and I imagine the buyer does as well. If the situation were different, perhaps on a one word .com domain name that did not have a BIN price, not being able to see the Whois records on similar domain names could have handicapped me a bit.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

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