GoDaddy Verification an Unnecessary Speed Bump

I won a domain name at GoDaddy Auctions on April 18, and it was delivered to my GoDaddy account this morning at around 4am. A few hours later, I went into my GoDaddy account, changed the nameservers to point to Afternic, and attempted to add it to my Afternic account so I could list it for sale.

For some reason, the domain name couldn’t be added to my account without verification via the addition of a third nameserver. The error message can be seen here for those who aren’t aware of what it looks like:

In lieu of going through the process of adding a third nameserver – partly because it sometimes takes several attempts to complete the verification – I opted to add the domain name to Dan.com instead. I had no issues whatsoever. I went back to my GoDaddy control panel and changed the nameservers to Dan.

Both Dan.com and Afternic are owned by GoDaddy. I presume they each have their own way of verifying ownership, but it doesn’t make sense that one platform would require verification and the other would not.

Maybe Afternic uses a public Whois record search to verify ownership. Because GoDaddy defaults to Whois privacy, it couldn’t verify ownership that way. I don’t know but that’s a guess. Maybe Dan.com is less stringent about ownership verification? I am not sure about that either. I don’t understand why one GoDaddy platform allows me to list my domain name immediately and the other doesn’t.

In my opinion, ownership verification should first be done behind the scenes via GoDaddy’s internal database. It should be simple to verify that the domain name is in my registrar account. I think that should be easy enough to do given that GoDaddy pulls my Afternic listing data already. I understand that this could not happen easily for domain names registered outside of GoDaddy.

You might ask why I care if a domain name is listed on Afternic if the Dan.com listing will be pulled onto GoDaddy searches automatically. Good question. The reason is because I want to allow inventory quality domain names like this to be listed on GoDaddy with the payment plan option. I believe the domain name needs to have an Afternic listing in order to be listed for sale with a payment plan offered.

This is an unnecessary speed bump that should be fixed.