Unpacking My First Spaceship Sale

I sold my first domain name via Spaceship today, and I thought I would share how it came about.

I recently listed nearly 2,000 domain names for sale on Spaceship with BIN prices and the make offer option enabled. The domain names were all priced below $5,000. None of the domain names were parked at Spaceship. I figured I would give Spaceship/Namecheap the opportunity to sell these domain names within their network, and if a domain name is purchased, I would pay the 5% commission.

Keeping my nameservers at Afternic allowed me to avoid paying a higher commission if one of these domain names was sold via GoDaddy. Since the time I listed domain names on Spaceship, I closed somewhere around 20 BIN + LTO deals at GoDaddy. Given how many domain names I have sold at GoDaddy in the time I’ve had many listed on Spaceship, I might have paid more in a commission penalty than I would saved, although it’s impossible to know if these buyers would have bought at Spaceship with their nameservers.

Last week, I wrote about a change I made to a large swath of my domain names I had priced between $997 – $999. Mind you, some of these domain names had been listed for more money at the time I listed them on Spaceship in September. I shared that I repriced these domain names to induce a sale. Within 24 hours, I shared that I closed one LTO deal:

Yesterday afternoon, I changed about 1,000 Afternic prices from $997/999 with 3-5 month LTO option to $1,999 with 13 month LTO option and Make Offer ($1,150 minimum). One of those sold this AM on a LTO.

Changing prices, LTO lengths, nameservers…etc can help induce deals.

— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) November 7, 2025

In response to this, the Namepros account suggested changing nameservers could be more impactful to closing sales because people are more likely to monitor nameserver changes than price changes:

Changing nameservers is the biggest driver because there are far more services/tools that monitor nameservers than monitor domain prices.

We can help you with new nameservers: https://t.co/D9bPHnGhBj

😇

— NamePros (@NamePros) November 8, 2025

This does make sense since there are many nameserver monitoring tools.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to make a quick change to test this theory. I changed all of the nameservers for the domain names that are registered at GoDaddy that had the $1,999 price change. I decided to change the nameservers to Spaceship, and I set a reminder to change them back to Afternic. I figured anyone with a nameserver monitor would receive an alert email today and I would be happy to close a deal via Spaceship.

Lo and behold, I received a sale email from Spaceship this morning. One of the domain names was purchased for €1717.41, which matches the $1,997 BIN price in USD. This happens to have been a domain name that was originally priced at $1,997, briefly changed to $999 in October on Afternic/GoDaddy, and changed back to $1,999 last week.

I can’t say for certain what exactly made this domain name sale happen. It could have been random, may have been a nameserver change, or the buyer could have seen the Spaceship landing page and it helped induce a sale. I don’t know for certain, but I am happy to close my first Spaceship sale.

I’ll probably change nameservers again at some point soon to continue this testing.

On a related note, the Spaceship sale and transfer process were quick and easy. The only thing I did not appreciate is the $56 fee that was imposed by PayPal. When I’ve sold domain names on other platforms that pay out via PayPal (such as Atom), there is no PayPal fee charged.