I noticed a new Afternic “domain for sale” landing page I thought I would share with readers. As you can see below, the landing page does not have any pay per click advertising (PPC) on it, and the lander makes it very clear that the domain name is for sale. You can visit Stallions.com to have a look at the landing page in action.
On the top of the landing page, you can see the call to action with a phone number to call an Afternic sales associate. Afternic likes to encourage people to call rather than submit their contact information via form. Their sales team is likely very strong on the phone, and getting someone to call is a good way for the company to sell its domain names.
If a visitor clicks on the “Inquire Today!” button (or if they scroll down), they are taken to a form to fill out. My guess is Afternic will attempt to call the prospective buyer if a phone number is left, or the team will follow up via email if there is no contact phone number.
I reached out to Paul Nicks, GM of GoDaddy’s Aftermarket, and he told me this landing page is new and is not publicly available for Afternic clients at this time. NameFind is using this for sale landing page on some of its higher value domain name assets they would prefer to focus on selling rather than monetizing via PPC. Paul did say the landing page could be an option for Afternic clients in the future if there is a demand for it.
The Afternic.com platform is completely neglected by GoDaddy, and it’s just ridiculously outdated and buggy by now, which makes a mockery of the 20% commission they charge for sold names. Why can’t they spend a fraction of those commission fees on fixing Afternic.com? The user experience is just terrible, and a number of domainers do not use Afternic.com at all because it’s just too much of a headache and not worth it to them.
And to further spite their sellers, they go ahead and work on new landing pages for themselves, while continuing to leave the whole Afternic.com platform completely run down.
The publicly available landing pages also need to be updated. However, what is more urgent is that the entire platform needs to be updated. Why are buttons not working? Why is the control panel freezing up when I make edits? Why are price edits not being saved? Why does customer support not respond to messages? Why don’t they fix their new and terrible “transaction assurance” system? Why do I get logged out all the time? Why don’t they add any security features, such as 2-factor authentication and symbols in passwords? Why do listings stop working for no reason? Why do users get logged out randomly? No other marketplace platform is more buggy than theirs, and not other marketplace has such a dearth of customer support.
I’ve had buyers LEAVE transactions because there were too many bugs and customer support did not get back to them.
How can they let all these issues persist for years, while working on new landing pages exclusively for themselves? Aren’t all these issues that inconvenience thousands of sellers (and buyers – which is bad for namefind too!) day after day, year after year, important? Just shows you where their priorities are – NOT with their regular sellers!. Why is nothing ever being fixed on Afternic.com? I haven’t noticed a bug being fixed for years. Everything is the same as last year, and the year before that. I gave up trying to notify customer support about it a long time ago (nobody responds and nothing gets fixed).
Afternic has a great syndication network and a competent team of brokers. It’s just so unfortunate that everything else about their platform is not working. If they gave the platform the overhaul it needs, they’d earn it back in no time as more domainers would use their platform, and more domains would be pointed towards their landing pages, and more people would buy domains via Afernic.com (rather than mainly via Afternic’s network, as is the case today). Considering how they have let the platform fall into complete disrepair for so long, I doubt they are going do a one eighty and actually give the platform the attention it requires. The least they could do is lower commissions to 10-15%. Charging a 20% commission for what they currently offer is ludicrous.
So you’re saying they should fix Afternic.com?
I 2nd this (very long) post!
Spot On. Reach of GoDaddy syndication is great but Afternic.com leaves much to be desired. Paying 20% commission when nothing ever happens on Afternics end without having to bug them through email to get things done. I just completed a sale there but also deleted 400+ domains from my account as the frustration on that one sale was enough for me to say I’ll stick to my own sales pages like usual as less headaches and deals wrapped in days instead of weeks.
I concur
I would love to see this lander as an option for Afternic clients.
Will Sedo come up with a similar landing page soon? What do you think?
I don’t think so, Sedo enbrace their pagking business they didn’t want to get into innovation. That’s too bad because I love selling domains via Sedo, We want domain buyers to land on a clean “For sale” landing page like this.
Landing pages with ads are history!
Bingo !!!
Linda, you are right on the money.
Sedo wants you/us to use the parking pages which generates pennies when they should be generating dollars. It has been that way for years.
if you want to use the for sale banner on the ppc page, then use the standard dns which is just ok.
I do not understand why sedo does not have a particular dns for domains to land on for sale pages. (ie, ns1 sedosale,com)
I have mentioned it many times to them but they don’t care.
Hi Linda, hi Meyer,
we’ll be presenting our solution for sales landing pages without ads in the not-too-far future. I cannot tell you an exact date today, but should be available before fall arrives.
YES!
That’s good to hear Sedo. I had discontinued parking with Sedo because traffic was being directed to spammy malware-type pages on several of my domains with no option for potential buyers to realize the domain was for sale.
Here’s a recent example from March on someone’s domain parked at Sedo that ended up being a malware browser page hijacker… not good – https://www.namepros.com/threads/sedo-parking-dangerous.968365/page-3#post-6025236
Hi Larry, thanks! If you don’t want to use zero click you can tell our customer support or your account manager and we can deactivate it for you. If you complete the Parking Certification, you can also be sure to only get ads from premium advertisers, so no forwarding to sketchy pages. (Which we don’t appreciate just as the next guy – as soon as we receive word of spammy forwarding, we always report it to the advertisers)
Anyhow, the ads-free solution will be presented and we’re hoping you’ll check it out then. We’ll let you know! 🙂
Best regards,
Christoph from Sedo.
Wow. Sedo Rules 🙂
Hello Sedo,
Fall has almost arrived, where is the ad-free landing page solution you talked about? Just give us ONE landing page like Efty so that we avoid the hassle of moving our domains to somewhere else.
Elliot, could you contact Sedo and write a post on this matter, because many domainers are waiting for this ad-free landing page solution from Sedo. Thanks.
You should contact Sedo about it. I don’t really use Sedo, and I don’t use my blog to tell other companies what they should be doing. I have felt that if a company is not doing something I want them to do, I either implore them to do it, find another service that is doing what I want, or create my own thing to solve my problem.
“…if there is a demand for it.”
WTF? YES there is demand for it. If it was beneficial for NameFind, why would it not be beneficial for everyone else?!?!?
If Godaddy paid Afternic some more attention, and got all those names in PENDING STATUS updated, they could make millions more per year, YES MILLIONS!
The Millions they are trying to squeeze from their personal portfolio, is sitting in PENDING STATUS for hundreds of years already.
I know they have done tweaks to the system, but add more manpower, customer service, get those backlogged names cleared up, and start making money.
Everything everyone said above is invaluable first hand knowledge, godaddy couldn’t get with thousands of dollars worth of market research.
Joe Styler your in charge of the aftermarket, it’s on you, godaddy has the resources, but they choose to ignore it.
@Ryan “… all those names in PENDING STATUS”
This is a valid criticism. Repeatedly, names submitted for sale via Afternic remain in pending status for long periods of time, unless you write the company to move the domain to active status. It’s as if no one is regularly checking for domain name submissions.
I somewhat disagree with the original poster about the Afternic interface. It works well enough for me, and I do like the general layout.
I agree that the Afternic platform is pretty buggy, but I still manage to navigate it and have made many sales through it.
I also find that, in general, support is quite responsive.
Elliot –
What happened to the checkbox to be notified of new comments to this post?
No idea… will look into it. Maybe something happened when I upgraded the new WordPress.
I too dislike the interface at Afternic.com. I also have to constantly hound them to get things moved from Pending to Active. That said, they are usually responsive and friendly. I feel we do not have much choice if we want to get our domain names featured in line on the home page of GoDaddy.com, which is where most domain name buyers will go to see if a name they desire is available and at what price. I frequently check to see that my domain names show up when someone does a query there to ensure it’s working. I have sold several domain names through Afternic, presumably through the GoDaddy.com query box.
Afternic, GoDaddy, and Sedo all need to work on improving user interface and experience.
I have seen alot of recent improvements with GoDaddy, but there are always persistent frustrating bugs and things that don’t work consistently.
The sad news is, this was posted nearly two years ago and the domain is still for sale.
I have plenty of valuable names from over two years ago.
Also, I think they did away with this landing page.