A month ago today, I sold my first domain name via payment plan at DAN.com. Although the buyer’s monthly payment is only around $100, I passed break even on the domain name with the second payment and will continue to earn revenue on the deal for a few years (or get the domain name back). One thing I learned today is that the seller may want to specify a specific payment payout preference (PayPal or wire transfer) to the escrow agent depending on the seller’s location and default payment preference.
When I set up my DAN account, PayPal was the default. I did not wish to provide my banking information unless necessary, and on smaller deals, PayPal worked great. When I closed my first larger deal on DAN a few weeks ago, I had to add my banking information to be paid via wire transfer in order to avoid the PayPal fee. This was fine, and receiving a wire transfer is better than paying a 3% fee.
Because DAN is located in Europe, my bank charges a $25 fee for incoming international wire transfers. Again, on larger deals worth thousands of dollars, a $25 fee is no big deal.
When I changed my payout preference, it changed for my entire account. This means all payments are remitted to me via wire transfer, including the smaller monthly payments. In essence, if this were to continue, approximately 25% of each monthly payment would be taken by my bank because of the $25 international wire transfer fee. Even though the remainder of the payments for this particular deal are all profit, I do not want my bank to take a quarter of the proceeds from me.
I exchanged emails with DAN CEO Reza Sardeha, and he told me the ability for sellers to select their payout method on a transaction-level is on the roadmap and should be introduced in two months. In the interim, Reza informed me that I can ask the escrow agent to note that I should be paid via PayPal on this specific transaction going forward. An alternative, I would imagine, is that I could delete my banking information and revert to PayPal on my account. This way, all subsequent monthly payments and new monthly payments below the wire threshold will be paid via PayPal. I would have to add the banking information back the next time I have a larger deal though.
This is a bit of an inconvenience, and it is something I will have to remember the next time I am scheduled to get a small payout, but it will work in the interim.
Thanks for the info.
I had exact same issue few months ago and I have posted about it here. You lose $25 when you get paid by wire. I am surprised that DAN has so many clients in USA and they don’t somehow manage to send us the wire payments using a US Bank Account. DAN should seriously think about domainers losing $25 every time they get a payment.
From what I learnt,you dont get charged a PayPal fee if transaction is up to $2000 but above 2000 I think you do.I just leave my banking information and set a default back to paypal if need be if transaction is up to $2k.
I did a $5k transaction and just switch back to bank account.
Easy.
That is the other option I mentioned. I would prefer to be able to select PayPal for payments under $2k and wire for payments above that figure without a workaround.
Ya, i had very same issue at some point. Now i make sure to remind how i want to get paid for each payment. Otherwise ball might be dropped. They definitely need that feature.
Other feature they had but no longer works, is you used be able to put custom background for your non logo domains. Now that doesnt work, because if you have logos on some of your domains, the custom background also becomes part of logo domains and looks terrible. This happened when they rolled out their 5 year payments right before NamesCon in Jan, but they still havent fixed the issue.
Very frustrating, as i do think having a custom background for non logo domains makes a significant difference for sale. Hence i moved a lot of my domains without logos to EPIK. If Dan doesnt care, no big deal, but i dont want to lose sales because the bug is still not fixed.
If you have the PayPal email and the wire information in your payout settings, you can just choose PayPal, and if the payout is above $1,500/2,000 ( I don’t remember the exact amount ) they will automatically pay you out via a bank transfer so you don’t need to do anything on your end.