Problems, Bugs and Fixes at Afternic - Report Problems Here

[carob]

I suggest a new thread titled Problems, Bugs and Fixes at Afternic - Report Problems Here. Then we can all list our issues so Afternic have to fix them. These Afternic probs have been repeatedly flagged up across numerous threads on here over a period of time, including the need for 2FA. Godaddy own Afternic and have the resources and motivation to fix it - this risky mess is unacceptable and reflects badly on their brand.

For info, Afternic keep reverting some of my domains to "In Review" status for no reason, and I only know that if I log in there to check on them. Until I then ask support to take them out of Review they are not listed for sale and will not sell at Afternic.

@Joe Styler When can we expect Godaddy to take action on Afternic, including implementing 2FA?

 

[tonyk2000]

Amazing, it is Sunday and @namesilo is trying to help to resolve something that is not their direct problem. NameSilo customer support should be an example for other registrars, shows perfectly how the things can and should be done...

 

[Joe Styler]

I would like to give a recap of some of the things we have been working on this past year as I think by reading this thread some things get overlooked and it may seem as if we are not moving forward unless you take a step back and look at the big picture. We have been doing some really cool thing this year.

We have added many more registrars to the Afternic network which is resulting in more opportunities for your domains to be seen and purchased by end users around the world. We have had a pretty significant increase in registrar partners focused in Asia. That has been exciting because there is renewed demand there in "non-chip" domains as Chinese investors who purchased chip domains were exposed to Western Premium names as well. We also expanded the number of partners non fast transfer domains are listed for sale.

We have also expanded significantly in Europe over the past year in terms of partners as well as local presence and language support. This enables us to sell more of your domains to end users in Europe with local sales representatives calling and emailing the buyers in their own language and time zone.

We also added a local support team which has helped reduce response times for support inquiries and helped to smooth out the sales process.

We also worked on expanding the partnerships with registrars to bring in more expired domain name inventory from third parties. This gives you a better chance to acquire good investment domains in one place and then easily list them for sale on Afternic's expanded network to get the names maximum exposure for sales.

We released a new beta view for managing domains in the domain control center that is more bulk focused and also allows direct integration into Afternic from within your GoDaddy domain view. You can list and edit domains for sale within GoDaddy’s domain management screen.

The new payment system we are releasing has taken a lot of development resources, but this is enabling us to make more exciting changes in the future. We pay a lot of people money daily and there were various ways to do that, think affiliates, resellers, parking at three different parking companies we run, domain sales via GoDaddy and Afternic, etc. What we are doing is getting all the various payment channels piped into one system that goes through a third party which is enabled to pay more ways than we can easily do. International payments via local banks in local currency for instance.

This is a pretty big undertaking to redo the various payment platforms and tie them into one place but in the end the goal is to more easily pay you for all your various payments in one place and to do it faster than we have previously been able to do. This is the ultimate goal. There are some issues that are popping up short term as we move towards a better/faster payment system, but this will ultimately allow us to speed up payments down the road.

Paying through a third party will allow our developers to have more time freed up to focus on other important projects in the future which will help us more rapidly address things that will further improve the platform.

We are working on continuing to improve the support received. We have hired additional people and are restructuring the teams internally to make sure they are able to better leverage the various strengths we have. This has been underway for a few months and will continue into the next year as we continue to hire and re-align various teams to better respond to our customers.

Most recently we hired and trained a new support team for Europe that works with the current Aftermarket teams to help strengthen the overall support experience. We have seen some exciting results in the past month as the average response time has decreased significantly and the hours advanced Aftermarket support is available to the general support has expanded.

As far as ownership verification and fast transfer etc. We have had to make some changes due to GDPR (European law which impacted certain WHOIS information). We have released changes to the way GoDaddy auctions are listed and verified, based on txt records now instead of WHOIS. This has led to greater efficiency and better real time verification of listings, especially when ownership recently changed for a domain.

We are planning on expanding this to Afternic listings in the future. This should help clear up a common complaint which is, newly acquired domains being listed by the previous owner on Afternic require a contact with support to clear up. This should not happen once this release is completed.

We also released in Beta an appraisal tool which has been helpful for various aspects of domain investing. One of the most significant impacts has been getting end users to see the value of a domain as more than a registration fee.

We have made significant investments in Afternic and GoDaddy's Aftermarket throughout the past year and the net result has been more sales for our customers and better opportunities to purchase domain names via the expiry auction. We have seen increased Aftermarket purchases as buyers are able to more easily explain why a domain is valuable to their partners, boss, or board when deciding to buy a premium domain.

I know we have a lot of other work to do but I wanted to share some of the recent projects we have been working on to let you know we have been investing in the Aftermarket platform as a whole and that there have been good results overall. Ultimately, we are working to reduce friction points for buyers and sellers and we understand from a seller standpoint there are some things that still need to be worked on, better service, faster smoother payments, and bulk tools. We are working towards those things in addition to expanding sales opportunities for sellers and inventory opportunities for buyers.

 

[Arca]

And my bank account is still frozen due to GoDaddy knowingly falsifying the payment details of my Afternic payment, with no apparent recourse in sight for salvaging the account at this point...

Practically all my problems as a domainer are caused by Afternic/GoDaddy. It's like this entity thinks the way to make profit is to inflict problems on and waste the time of their users. If only they knew that they could be making a lot more money by providing trustworthy, functional, professional and responsive services to their users.

One day I can't log in to Afternic, then GoDaddy steals a domain from my account to put in their own portfolio, then GoDaddy makes it harder for me to transfer out domains (as a security measure after they stole a domain from me. The irony seems lost on them though...) then domains get de-listed from my Afternic account by a user with super privileges, then Afternic doesn't send out the payment anywhere near a timely manner, then 80% of my Afternic listings get stuck in "in review", then GoDaddy lies to my bank so that my bank account gets frozen, then Afternic is unable to remove outdated listings so that I can list a newly bought domain, then an Afternic broker sells a domain for less than what I approved, then GoDaddy doesn't automatically refund the payment for a domain I bought in Auctions that got renewed, then Afternic doesn't save new listings, then Afternic doesn't send out fast-transfer emails, then Afternics fast-transfer doesn't work, then CS or AN support tells me a blatant lie, etc. etc. etc. I keep experiencing these and countless other issues.

And the worst part is that these issues are not going away in the foreseeable future, they are just way too entrenched in the way these companies are operated, and they show no commitment to thoroughly fixing them. The deception and difference is not going away. Anyone who's a "power user" (i.e. full time domainer) of these companies is bound to encounter a torrent of problems non-stop. Being an Afternic/GoDaddy user is just a never ending loop of these kinds of issues, and as domainers we simply have to slog through one battle after another, ad infinitum, constantly wasting precious time (time, aka money).

Same goes for this thread. Just a waste of time reporting Afternic issues. How much better is Afternic as a result of the hundreds of posts in this thread? Afternic is a hydra, and for the few issues that did get solved, a dozen new ones popped up in their place. The website seems more dysfunctional and closer to falling apart than ever, I don't even manage to log in a lot of the time these days. While I would like to secure my AN account with 2FA, I fear the implementation would likely be so shoddy that I simply would get locked out of my account. But they really should work on better security. Afternic.com even tends to load with unencrypted http a lot of the time, so that log in details are sent in plain text! It's 2018 and they can't even get their website to consistently use https connection... And, it was officially announced that NO further updates improvements/fixes/updates to the Afternic site would be made in 2018, because apparently it's not important to deal with a platform so full of bugs that it can generate a 700+ post thread, so reporting issues here that won't be fixed is truly a pointless exercise. Yet I find myself partaking in that pointless exercise over and over again for some reason. That's how frustrated I am, and just shows you how little we can do, besides ineffective forum venting. Apologies for the meaningless GoDaddy/Afternic rant, but I'm just so fed up with with how poorly these companies are treating their users that are lining their pockets...

 

[carob]

So, the original question is still open. Who removed my listing of GD-regged domain with instant transfer approved and matching whois email? Are there any guarantees the my resubmitted listing would not disappear again (and instantly, after the privileged afternic api customer sends his next batch of domains, with my domain inside)?

Cc @Joe Styler ...

Did you read the earlier posts in this thread reporting that certain superusers at Afternic have the power to upload spreadsheets that automatically list all the names in them, including ones they do not own which are already listed on Afternic by the true owner. So they will overwrite your submission, repeatedly, there is nothing you can do about it.

 

[main]

It's been mentioned before, but please allow the number of domains shown from the dashboard to show more than up to 50 domains per page. A lot of us have large portfolios and this limit makes it incredibly difficult to manage. I'd suggest allowing up to 500 or 1,000 on a page. At the very least show up to 100. This should be an incredibly easy change to make.

Sometimes we don't want to use the spreadsheet option.

 

[Arca]

@Paul Nicks - Here are a some of the issues that impede Afternic from smoothly functioning as a portal for domain owners to list their names into the most active aftermarket in the world:

- No built-in function for dealing with “already listed” domains besides contacting support via email each time

- Maximum 50 domains can be viewed per page on the portfolio management page (very cumbersome if you have hundreds or thousands of domains listed - making bulk edits on afternic.com is frustrating)

- No built-in way to deal with domains inexplicably stuck in “pending review” for weeks and months

- Domain portfolio management page is extremely slow to load, buggy, and saving changes often does not work

- I inexplicably get logged by the system at times, especially when making listing edits

- Domain portfolio management page requires horizontal scrolling

- Customizing domain portfolio management columns does not work, it is reverted back to default once you leave the domain portfolio management area

- There is a spreadsheet bulk edit/add function, but it is complicated to use because it has too many settings columns. It's not convenient to upload a spreadsheet if we just want to make a few edits. Improved upload/edit/delete functionality on Afternic.com would be far better than having to deal with the spreadsheet

- Domains get “hidden” for no reason at times

- Account owners are not notified when domains are removed from their Afternic.com account and we are not provided with a log of domains removed from our account by customer support/the system

- Sellers are not informed when a sale fall through (so we don't know that we can offer the domain for sale again, and we continue wasting time reserving it for an afternic.com transaction that is not going to happen - please send out an email when you deem a sale to have fallen through)

- There are no security features besides an alphanumeric password, we can't change our username, no two factor authentication (and we can't even use symbols !@#$%^ in passwords)

- When using the Afternic.com I am inexplicably sent to a page telling me:

Resend the activation email.

Please enter the account name selected during registration, and we will get the activation sent out again. Be sure to add [email protected] to your contacts list so the email isn't sent to your spam filter.

* Please verify your account first. You can use the form to resend the verification email.

I encounter this error page on a daily basis. I don't actually have to re-verify my account (even though I enter my email, I'm never sent this email). Clicking around on the website eventually enables me to get back into my account again. But it's still annoying to encounter this bug every day.

- Support takes days to answer any inquiry, and often they outright ignore support request (no response is provided by support)

- There is no ticket support system. If you had this, perhaps CS could be held accountable for ignoring support requests

- No way to control opted in/opted out of Afternic network settings. Once you opt in to the premium network there is no way to opt out via Afternic.com (besides manually deleting the domain from Afternic.com)

- We also need to manually delete and relist every opted in domain that is moved from one registrar to another, in order to enable fast-transfer subsequent to moving a domain to a new registrar. A built-in function at Afternic.com for dealing with this would be more convenient

- Some brokers do not ask for permission to work a lead. If there is no "floor" pricing set, brokers must ask the seller before they can reach out to the prospective buyer. If seller negotiates with buyer, and the broker also negotiates with the buyer unbeknownst to the seller, that can easily cause confusion, misunderstandings and mess up sales. Also, there is no way to indicate our preference for sending leads only to certain brokers which is a highly needed feature.

- The new transaction system is still far worse and slower than the old one. A number of glitches and bugs that were pointed out in this thread one month ago still exist

- Many TA agents do not respond to messages regarding transactions and there is still no chat log or record being created for messages exchanged between seller/TA agent

- The way transactions are handled in the new system is too inconsistent. Sometimes I push a domain to Afternic's registrar holding account and the TA Agent immediately marks it as "transfer complete". Other times I do the same and the TA Agent refuses to mark the domains a "transfer complete". When sellers indicate that a domain has been transferred, the system does not save it (unlike the old system). Transfers are taking 3-4x longer to complete under the new system than they used to with the old system.

- Estimated payout dates are highly inaccurate and no "sold date" is shown

- Parts of the “account summary” details have not been working for more than a year, and this section was further broken by the introduction of the new transaction system (doesn't updated at all anymore). Would also be good if you could expand the amount of sales data displayed in this area with more relevant stats and numbers.

- Adult keyword review system is inconsistent, non-adult names are blocked from the platform, while a search for any of the most common “adult” keywords on afternic.com show a ton of adult domains already listed on the platform

I understand from your comment on domaininvesting.com that the Afternic.com website platform is not supposed to be a place for buyers to come and buy domains, and that GoDaddy channels all aftermarket development resources towards expanding your reseller network (which is providing fantastic results for sellers, so I certainly appreciate the continued development of this sales channel), while Afternic.com is merely meant to be a portal for domain owners to list and manage their names. However, I hope that the (non-exhaustive) list of issues above demonstrates that the platform currently does not serve the latter function in a satisfactory way, and that it is in need of extensive updates, improvements, and continued development to reach that level of functioning. So while the buyer-facing aspects of Afternic.com will not see any updates/improvements, I hope you can commit to focusing some of GD's resources towards fixing the seller-facing aspects of Afternic.com, so that the platform can adequately and effectively serve its stated function of being a portal for domain owners to list and manage their names for sale.

 

[tonyk2000]

It was always sufficient to add an own domain to own Afternic account (even as "inactive" listing, if not for sale) to prevent afternic api customers to add it as "theirs" - even though they do not really own it.

Is it no more the case?

My recent experience:

Added GoDaddy-regged domain, enabled fast transfer. All good. After ~2 weeks, the domain disappeared from my afternic account and is now listed by somebody else, with different price. Most notably, real whois email (which afternic should be able to check, as it is GoDaddy-regged domain) is the same as my Afternic account email. And the domain had fast transfer enabled - approved by myself.

How was it possible for the system ( or for any human from service@ ) in the above circumstances to allow somebody else to add it, and to remove my listing?

@Joe Styler

 

[Joe Styler]

Yes there is a 50/50 split test that started with pay over time. I will have to get some more info on it.
What I do know is if the buyer decides to pay over time you as the seller would be paid in full for the sale. You would not get incremental payments. Not sure on the exact time frame but when the domain sells sometime not at the end of the payments.
This is only currently available on domains up to $20k and is only being tested on half the domains now to see how it performs.

 

[inforg]

Maybe not the right thread, but I wanted to throw a positive shout out to Erik at Afternic. He brokered a domain last week for me. My asking price was 2488, a price I felt was already pretty aggressive. Buyer offered $1500
I told Eric I needed to NET $1500 which means at least $1875ish.

Eric closed it for me at $2248 and I netted almost 1800

Good job Afternic!

 

[CJ6]

One problem that I have, I will have domains "in review" forever until I actually contact them.

 

[Arca]

And yet, if you go to Afternic and search f*ck, sh*t, p*ssy, etc. It will return thousands and thousands of results.

I believe I have figured out why there are thousands of domains listed on Afternic with obviously adult keywords, like fuck, pussy, cock, porn, etc., even though anyone here who has tried to list names with those keywords, even non-adult names that could potentially be an adult name gets blocked by the system from doing so.

In another thread I detailed my struggles with a "super user" user who is able to list any domain he wants on Afternic, even if that domain is in my afternic account, and even if I have gone through the ownership verification process over and over again (so there is no doubt that I own the domain and he doesn't). Any domain included on his spreadsheet gets wiped out of other users accounts and gets force listed in his account. Customer support confirmed that these users are given such privileged rights. It seems this extends being able to list adult names as well.

I checked the listings for lots of adult names picked at random by searching for various adult keywords at Afternic.com, and the sellers who have lots adult names listed for sale are other "super users". These users have listed thousands and thousands of domains with keywords that we regular sellers are 100% blocked from listing for sale. There might be a few regular sellers who have been able to sneak in an adult name or two, but nearly all of the adult domains I checked belonged to sellers like these:

Frank Schilling (407 272 domains listed on afternic - that's the total number of domains listed, not the number of adult names)
Rick Latona (237 504 domains listed on afternic)
Huge Domains (portfolio size at afternic is hidden, but they own nearly 3,000,000 domains...)
namecom (20 1002 domains listed at afternic) - not sure which company this handle represents
Domain Holdings (269 418 domains afternic)

I understand that these super users with huge portfolios are granted a lot of privileges that regular users are not, but since these and other big users have collectively listed thousands if not tens of thousands of adult domains for sale at Afternic, why not just do away with the whole rule of not allowing adult keywords? Your platform is already flooded with adult keyword domains in all categories by these sellers. Why continue to block regular sellers from listing adult names, while allowing these "super sellers" to list them? That's a very inconsistent way of enforcing your own rules and regulations. Whether a seller has 500 domains listed for sale, or 500 000, is not a meaningful criteria for blocking the former seller from listing adult names while permitting the latter to do so. An adult name is an adult name, regardless of your total portfolio size. I suggest you delete all of the adult keyword domains listed by these super sellers from your platform or simply remove the adult keyword ban for regular sellers and let everyone list them, regardless of portfolio size.

 

[main]

One annoying factor for me... I have several hundred names listed in Afternic. The 50 listings (max) at a time per page is severely annoying. Can this be upped? I'd love to see 200, or 500, or more as an option.

Come on @Joe Styler. Get this done for us. We have been requesting this for a long time. This should literally take a programmer less than 10 minutes to update.

 

[Arca]

Also been having lots of problems with Afternic's "Transaction Assurance" recently. When I initiate account pushes, as per Afternic's own instructions, they often 5+ days to even accept the domain (and that is with me emailing them every other day telling them to accept the domain). TA Agents do not respond to messages 7/10 times. Also, sometimes they just take the domain into their holding account, but nobody moves it to buyer after that. For some TA agents, I do not know who they are since they don't reply to my messages, I need to send them "reminder" emails to move the transaction forward: Remember to accept the domain. Remember to push the domain to buyer. Remember to mark the domain as transfer completed. etc. This should not be necessary and TA's should strive to complete ownership transfer as soon as possible, as their delays and unresponsiveness is unprofessional and creates a really poor customer experience for buyers. Imagine sending Afternic thousands of dollars, and then facing lots of delays and difficulties in taking ownership of the purchased domain.

And I hope more support staff can be hired because [email protected] usually takes 4-7 days to respond, and sometimes do not respond at all, and if you inquiry is about anything slightly complex you'll surely have to go back and forth with them for a long time before somebody actually looks into you issue (seems like they often try to improve their "efficiency" by copy/pasting boilerplate answers that are unrelated to the issue at hand, in the hopes that you will give up and stop bothering them). Also, never ask them two questions in one email. They always address the first question, and ignore the second. It's a must to send them one email per issue/question if you want help.

Some payments are delayed. I was notified 5 weeks ago that Afternic would pay me within 1-3 days for a domain, but for some reason I didn't get the payment until now, 5 weeks later than their stated 1-3 days. Fortunately, most payments are on time these days, but I wish payments could be sent out on time 100% of the time.

I also keep seeing a certain payment failure pattern every now and then, most recently one week ago, which is that somebody buys a name via Afternic but their payment is rejected, and they then buy the name from me at another platform without any issues. I have seen many payments rejected at Afternic, but not once had this issue at another platform. I find it strange that these buyers are able to buy these domains from me at other platforms with the same payment methods that Afternic rejected, and it therefore seems like Afternic's payment verification system is oversensitive at times, and as a result deeming good payments suspicious. Rejecting good payments is obviously not a good thing, though I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes. I just see sales failing at Afternic, and then immediately after, the name sells via another platform without any payment issues.

The "account summary" is not working for more than half a year. How about fixing it or just deleting it, instead of letting all your users face a broken dashboard every day?

Any updates on when we will get better account security? Expanding password character options from alphanumerics to also symbols would be a start. And making all login pages encrypted by default should be done as well, in certain browsers and on certain devices the log in page is still plain http with login info being sent over the web in plain text.

I'm still being asked to click on a link to verify my email address daily. Since first registering, I have never again received this email. It would be nice if the Afternic website would let me add the names and do the edits I need to, without inexplicably taking me to a page telling me to verify my account by clicking on a link in an email that never materializes (and doesn't need to be clicked, as this is just a glitch). At time the entire Afternic page just breaks down, with a plain text message saying that my browser is severely outdated. I have the latest editions of chrome and safari, so it looks like it's Afternic's website that is severely outdated, not my browsers. I'd prefer to use FireFox though, but no buttons on the Afternic page work when I use that browser, so it's impossible to even log in via FireFox. Hopefully these issues can be fixed, because nobody is going to sign up to Afternic to make an offer or buy a name if the website doesn't work in their browser.

 

[Cdomains]

Afternic is way behind the times.

Their interface looks and works like it was made 10 - 15 years ago.

This is undoubtedly one of, if not the best, platform for making sales and

it should be used by any serious domainer, but using it is very frustrating and aggravating.

I know I am not alone when I say this site needs alot of work and a huge update!!!

 

[Arca]

So the question is... why a competing domain selling business hasn't popped up yet? Sedo isn't yet very good in my view.

As @anantj noted, it's probably not possible for any company to supplant Afternic's premium network of registrars. They have exclusive access to the search path of the most popular registrar (GD), which other marketplaces don't get access to, they have relationships and infrastructure in place to sell names via XXX registrars, many of them extremely popular with end-users, or in markets where it can otherwise be harder to passively sell your names into (i.e. China). On top of that they have a 13 million+ domain inventory to sell through this vast syndicate of registrars organized under Afternic. They have done a stellar job at setting up and expanding this network, and they've continued to add valuable partners. There is no way to reach more buyers than by listing at Afternic, making it the most important sales tool available to domainers.

They're so far ahead that no newcomer is ever going to build something better. Even established Sedo, which has a larger inventory and their own fast-transfer system in place, can't compete with Afternic's sales performance. And frankly nobody is complaining about Afternic's sales performance, as they get an A+ in that department. What everyone is complaining about is the awful Afternic platform/website, which is so bad that it makes users want to avoid them as much as possible, except for the basic domain listing at Afternic in order to get the benefits of their registrar network.

New companies do pop up in areas where they can compete with Afternic though. Recent years have seen a significant influx of new landing page providers, that are providing landers that are miles ahead of Afternic’s ones.

I think a testament to this is how Afternic as more than 13 million domains listed, yet only a few hundred thousand names are parked with them. They only provide two dated landing pages (one with a price inquiry form, one with a BIN/make offer option), and as a range of new companies have jumped in to provide far better solutions, domainers are choosing to send their type-in traffic to these better options instead. Competitors like Sedo have also updated their landing pages.

Afternic is losing out hugely by not developing afternic.com as a hub for type-in traffic. Before when I was sending type-in to Afternic, buyers often contacted me after a purchase to complain about the slow and frustrating process of buying a domain via Afternic.com, and about how terrible the platform is, and how things didn't work as they should during the purchasing process. Buyers seemed to be even more frustrated with the Afternic website than we as sellers in this thread are (probably because we're used to it, they jump in a the deep end unprepared when they sign up to buy a domain). Successful type-in sales require great landing pages and a functional platform, neither of which is available at Afternic.

So domainers use a growing number of competing companies for this purpose, and Afternic are losing out massively in this sales channel as a result. And their (mostly) stellar broker team is losing out on many valuable leads. That's another cost of not updating the Afternic website/platform. Competing companies are eating their lunch in the landing page/type-in segment. But regardless, Afternic will keep dominating the registrar syndication network channel, and without any viable alternative we'll be stuck with the afternic.com site/platform. The best would be if they would just do a complete turnaround and start the huge job of fixing up the website and then start adding much needed improvements (bulk management functionality, new landing pages, etc.), but as you noted, it seems unlikely that a turnaround is going to happen at this point.

 

[campout]

I had an Afternic fast transfer sale yesterday, for a name that I had at NameSilo. I got the notification from Afternic and NameSilo like normal, but 7 hours later the domain had still not been "fast transferred" out of NameSilo to GoDaddy where it was bought.

So I e-mailed NameSilo support to see if they knew what the problem was. (Usually the name would've automatically transferred out within about 15 minutes.) They told me that Afternic's system was sending invalid info through the fast transfer API integration, and then they manually approved the transfer out.

So I just want to let people know about this and also see if anyone else has been experiencing any out-of-the-norm performance errors from Afternic.

 

[campout]

I got an e-mail from Afternic two days ago that one of my names had sold via fast transfer. Meanwhile, two days later the domain is still in my registrar account at NameSilo -- it obviously hasn't been "fast transferred" to the buyer.

I just e-mailed Afternic about it, but wanted to mention it here, too.

 

[Arca]

I have previously praised and recommended Afternic's broker team in numerous posts across the forum. I always said there are two things that perform well at Afternic, their network and their brokers.

I would like to update my opinion on their brokers, as I cannot recommend their brokers anymore.

I used to commend Afternic brokers for their sincerity and hard work and willingness to work hard to close even smaller sales (mid-$XXX to low $XXXX). So as a result, out of 10 leads, they'd successfully close like 7 of them (very impressive!). Usually just in the $XXX-$XXXX range, but with such a high success rate it adds up fast.

Prior to using Afternic's brokers, I used the DomainNameSales brokers, who were absolutely awful. Communication with sellers were poor, and they just didn't listen. If I told them I accepted an offer of $1000, they would disregard my comment, and just push for $5000 until the buyer disappeared instead. Rather than taking a bunch of decent offers, they squandered every offer for the potential of making one big sale (which they never successfully managed to do).

Afternic's brokers actually listened, communicated well, and had a high closing rate, and I was very happy with their performance. I was even using Afternic landing pages for quite some time, sending buyers to such a malfunctioning and atrocious platform (not a good idea) just to let the Afternic brokers work their magic.

But in the last 3 months or so, something has changed. Whenever I tell them I accept an offer and to work on securing the payment, they instead try to get buyer up to some ridiculous amount and scare the buyer away. And communication has worsened notably, to the extent that I can hardly even get an update on a lead. Many brokers just refuse to provide any updates and simply don't respond at all to messages. It's just radio silence, similarly to the Transaction Assurance team. Out of the last 8-9 offers I accepted, the brokers squandered most of them. Only one broker listened and closed the sale as I instructed. As for the other brokers, their only task after I said I was ready sell was to secure payment, but instead they made the sale fall apart by chasing a higher sales price. In half of the cases, I couldn't even get a response though, so I'm not sure what they did to mess up the sale in those cases. When I did get a reply, the reason was them pushing for a higher price and the buyer disappearing. Regardless, for them to mess up most leads where a price I'm okay with is on the table is not something I have ever seen at Afternic, prior to the past few months.

 

[Arca]

They could do Afternic sellers a huge preventive favor if they labelled payments with "Afternic domain sales proceeds" or something like that. At least we'd have a shot at getting our seemingly unrelated screenshots from Afternic to be taken as a valid explanation of these payments sent out by GoDaddy. Otherwise, how is an Afternic screenshot going to explain an "online advertising income" payment from GoDaddy? To an outsider there is just no relation, and even a domain insider would expect to see some kind of parking income proof, because that's what GoDaddy labels the payment as!

They have the largest domain marketplace in the world, yet they are not even committed enough to the marketplace to set up a separate wire transfer template for it... I suppose they use the GoDaddy CashParking wire transfer template to pay all international wire transfers! (hence the "online advertising income" from GoDaddy in the payment details). The millions of payments they issue for Afternic sales don't even justify a separate and accurate wire transfer payment template!? We shouldn't be shocked they're not fixing up Afternic if the marketplace isn't even worth setting up an accurate wire transfer template to them.

The disregard for and lack of commitment to helping Afternic sellers is really disappointing, and as my frozen bank account shows, it is also creating seriously negative repercussions for Afternic sellers.

I really wish they would get this issue sorted out. It's unbelievable that I am fighting to get Afternic to simply label payments accurately, yet they insist on continuing to create fake payment details when they pay sellers. Just doesn't make any sense for them to do so.

Just please get this fixed, please include the words "afternic" and "domain" in some way in the wire transfer notes, so that we can convincingly legitimize these payments when asked.

 

[Primary Names]

@Joe Styler Really appreciate your presence here, the incredible support and patience.
Quite sure this has already been requested a multiple times.

At afternic Can we at least get a 100 listings per page if not 200. It is incredibly tedious if some
Also please let the page remember the number of listings set per page.

 

[Joe Styler]

Yes, it feels more like a lack of ambition at GoDaddy. The tech side is very simple, few lines of code on the redirect and a few more to pull up a report with SQL. One engineer around 5-10 days tops. Do you have someone with SQL experience?

It has nothing to do with that. That is not the answer on many of the things people ask or of course it would be done. It is not a wordpress site or something where you can just go in and make a 5 minute update.

The main reason we do not offer this now is that we use a third party software on the back end for that part of Afternic. It is not our software we can just change. That is how Afternic was when we bought it. In the current state we would have to purchase a license for each customer to see their info. We have purchased additional licenses for our top sellers.

We have a balance of spending time redoing our older code, integrating the companies we buy into our code base, and releasing new features, or onboarding new sales partners, etc. We do all of this and have over the past several years done some amazing things on the back end to be able to integrate services better and faster and also allow for scale, worldwide. Like opening and supporting a European sales team that has landers in local language and support and sales teams in those languages in Europe. China is underway as well. Navigating through International compliance and infrastructure takes real time and hard work to get things to work on the front end seamlessly when someone comes to buy your domain on a registrar in China in Chinese that we added and had to do dev work to get onboard in the last year, or a sales lander in German in Germany getting to a broker on our team who is in Europe and Speaks German and gets them on the phone right then on their time zone. on our backend (most of the time).

We have also been redoing the back end code for things like Smartname. Behind the scenes now that code is all pretty much redone and retired. There is now an easy way to get the domains that have duplicate records on parking to be removed from the person who doesn't own it and added automatically to the correct account on GoDaddy's cash parking using that code base. A solution for the smartname side will come in the near future. That work on the backend involved many other things as well for parking and now we are able to scale easier. We serve pages and ads faster and better, have a better performing template and are performing much better revenue wise for people who use us than at any time in the recent past with more improvements on the way in the near future.

We have been heavily focused on improving sales reach, but we have also focused on a lot of things in the back end which will allow for other changes in the future to be faster and easier. The sales focus has helped our sellers overall see a dramatic increase in their average sales price, and average sell through rate over the past couple years.

We have been having some meetings lately focusing more and more on the customer experience and that will continue to improve over the next year. Things like stats being available were discussed. Most if not all of the suggestions from customers on here were included.

I appreciate all the feedback. That's why I am here, so please keep it coming. My point is that often there are other things going on. We are not ignoring you, quite the opposite.

 

[NTLK]

When I login to Afternic it always feels like I'm timetravelling back to the 90's/00's. So I'm really wondering how it's possible that Afternic doesn't have a responsive website in this day and age. The site is practically unusable on mobile.

To a degree SEDO has the same problem, but at least they tried with a semi-responsive design. When you compare it to e.g. DAN though, it's a world of difference.

 

[carob]

I'm pleased that Afternic added 2FA, so now I'm willing to list domains on a Fast Transfer basis at Afternic. And I noticed they have improved the form for contacting support - it now has a specific dropdown for reporting domains stuck in In Review Status.

Amazingly, those In Review support requests seemed to get acted on in a matter of hours now, not many many days like it used to be. A big improvement, thanks.

One issue I'll flag up people might want to be aware of - it seems sometimes changing a price on a domain bumps it into In Review status, so you might want to check the status of individual domains after you modify them.

Sadly, it seems there is still no quick way to go through your listings to locate domains that are In Review - you have to go through endless pages each showing max 50 domains per page. It isn't just inconvenient, it is likely keeping domains In Review and costing sales - this could easily be fixed by showing more domains per page or fixing the search/filter functions.

 

[Joe Styler]

It is US only, meaning only customers in the US will see this option to pay over time. That may change over time but that is how it is launching for the foreseeable future.
We are using Klarna for the pay over time option, more information on Klarna can be found here. https://www.godaddy.com/help/what-is-klarna-41021