How Much Time Do You Give Someone to Pay?

I have been going back and forth with a prospective buyer on DAN.com for several months. We exchanged offers multiple times, I made a counteroffer I was sure he would accept, and the offer timed out. I asked him a couple of questions, which were met with silence. A couple of weeks later, he made the same offer to me, and instead of playing games, I accepted the offer.

When I buy a domain name, I make my payment as soon as the agreement is signed or as soon as the platform and my bank will allow. If I agree to a deal during business hours, I make every effort possible to fund the deal immediately. Some buyers are like me and others drag their feet. When I have negotiated via email with someone over a period of time, we have usually established some sort of rapport. I can get status updates on payment and the counterparty is typically forthcoming. When negotiating via platform like DAN, the experience may be a bit less personal.

With DAN, once a deal is agreed upon, the buyer is sent a link to the payment page to proceed with the purchase. In addition, the buyer and seller only communicate with the DAN representative via the negotiation screens. So far, according to my DAN account representative, the buyer has neither paid nor indicated how payment will be made.

For this particular deal, I believe the buyer would need to pay via wire transfer. By this point, though, I would imagine the buyer should have indicated his payment preference and/or requested bank wire details to facilitate the wire transfer. To my knowledge, the buyer has not communicated with DAN regarding the status of payment.

Based on my experience at DAN, the vast majority of deals are paid for within hours or maybe a day tops. When a buyer is slow to pay, the deals usually end up getting canceled because the buyer defaults. Given the length of time this buyer has been inquiring about my domain name and trying to buy it, I would be surprised if the buyer defaults. That said, I am not going to keep the deal on the table indefinitely.

I am curious about how long you would give someone to make payment for a domain name.

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

7 COMMENTS

  1. I’m the same way; as a buyer, I strive to make payment once an agreement is reached. It’s unfathomable otherwise.

    The longest I had waited for the other party to come up with payment after agreement was 45 days. That was more than a decade ago at Escrow.com. That record was recently broken and I will share more details in the near future.

    • I am willing to be more flexible when the buyer clearly communicates payment timing at the time a deal is reached or why a delay is necessary once a deal is agreed upon. Not paying right away and then going silent is a deal killer.

  2. Here the situation is that the buyer thinks the domain he is buying is not valuable or the price is on higher side.

    Try explaining him about payment plan or reduce the price and see.

    Buyer sometimes gets better option and of course these days people are moving towards other TLDs.

    • I just looked, and the buyer has been trying to buy the domain name since February of 2020.

      The deal has already been finalized. He made an offer of an amount I previously offered, and I accepted. There’s no more negotiating or discussing price or terms. If the buyer doesn’t pay, the deal is dead and I will ask DAN to prevent him from contacting me again.

  3. If I am not mistaken, all offers on Dan.com – as well as other platforms – are valid/binding for 7 days.
    Of course, you can extend it longer if situation warrants it, but you can also back out (or threaten to…) at that point.

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