Domain Liquidation & Flipping Marketplace Opinions

[VURG]

Hello,

I have long held the belief that the range in services to liquidate large volumes domains and flip domains is limited. It has been my opinion that this is related to fact that domain marketplaces tend to focus heavily on attracting the higher price sales and also related to weaknesses in selling formats adopted in relation to large volume domain names. I have been dreaming about starting a marketplace to deal with this for many years and have been dreaming up strategies on how to offer an improved way of selling domain names in bulk and for flipping domain names quickly. My more recent strategies seem a lot more affordable and hence less risky than my older strategies and I am building my confidence at whether I will attempt to introduce a new marketplace for domain names. I also am confident that the domain name market is a very good test market to trial new selling strategies before approaching alternative marketplaces and so I am quite confident that domain names are a good starting point but there might be more money outside the domain name market.

I am not going to do anything in a rush. I have many responsibilities and so as interested as I am in opening opportunities in domaining, I have to wait until the time is right. My background is in statistics and so I have limited programming experience and I will have to hunt around to find the right people to work with. However, as I said, I have a strong belief that by building a good domain liquidation and domain flipping website, there is many opportunities in testing new selling strategies.

I believe that a lot of domain names get sold at very prices and get dropped unnecessarily due to the complexities of selling large quantities of domain names and that by improving the way people sell names a lot of people who get very poor prices will get a lot better prices. It is my observation that selling strategies for domain names are often very time poor (require a lot of time per sale) and due to this it is many people would rather drop a domain than sell it. A key interest for me is to find ways of reducing the time to sell names so that more will be sold. Many people don't realise that due to the time cost of selling a domain, many people consider a $50 sale a waste of money as the time cost with a $50 sale is too high.

As I am currently just dabbling with the idea of creating a marketplace and haven't made any commitments yet, I am very interested in getting opinions on how to deal with selling domains quickly. I am particularly interested in finding out information people have on existing marketplaces and processes they implement that cause delays. I'm not a big believer in making pretty websites at the cost of functionality. I think domainers want marketplaces that will make them money quickly regardless of how it looks.

If I get involved in creating this marketplace, my initial interest is not about the million dollar sales. Rather it is a focus on building better liquidity for people who have excess domain names and people who specialise in flipping domain names quickly. I am very interested in all opinions of people including those who consider the domain flipping to be a saturated market with not many options.

I'm a stubborn guy and I have spent the last 10 years forming my opinion on the problems and solutions with the domain liquidation market and so it may take a bit to change my mind on ideas. I am also quite protective of my intellectual property and so I can't share all my ideas on this yet. I will pay attention to peoples opinions and I am very grateful for advice on this.

It has taken a long time for me to consider seriously about starting a marketplace for domains that requires programming skills as I don't have them and my past projects in domaining allowed me mostly to work alone on my sites. I look forward to any advice anyone has on this.

Also, I will try and generate a list of domain selling sites so that I know what I can compare my service to if I get it working:

Domain Sites:
GoDaddy Auctions
Sedo
NameJet
BuyDomains
bido.com
Namepros
DNF
eBay

Please let me know what else I can put on the list. Thanks,

Phil

 

[garptrader]

Yes, it is common in the industry to drop a domain that one does not feel is likely to generate a sale worth the intense marketing effort of reaching out to end users or the time involved to generate a $25 sale on a domain forum. But when the domain drops another investor will often pick up that same name and price it for many hundreds of dollars. I recall one such .Net I dropped and seeing a couple years later another individual had sold it for around $300. It is not difficult to find potential end users for one's domains using search engines. It is a completely different task to connect with a decision maker within that company and convince them to open their wallet for your domain.

 

[ImageAuthors]

I'm 2/3 finished with a market place designed to solve these problems.

Frustrating thing is ... I haven't had time to work on it for the past 2 weeks because selling domains distracts me from building. Ugh!

 

[Name Trader]

The problem I see that you will need to overcome is that most portfolio (bulk) sales are with a bunch of unrelated domains. Almost nobody is interested in buying unrelated domain in bulk (unless there is one domain you want which you are prepared to buy a whole lot of trash that comes with it). If you could keep the listings for related domains only, I think you might have more chances of sales.

But, IMHO, these plans are destined to failure because the problem required solving is driven by the supply-side desire rather than something which is desired by the marketplace. You don't see buyers lamenting there is no marketplace for buying cheap bulk domains. All the calls are coming from domainers.