Selling Domains
A few years ago I purchased a few domain names. I got a great price and have held them since. Recently I decided to sell off those domains. I have not had much experience selling a domain before. The experience I have had, was around purchasing domains.
In the past I have been part or brokered a few purchases of domain names for clients. I had a mixed bag of success and failures when working on buying adomain name from an existing party. In one instance the price was over 50K for a domain name. It happened to be the name of an established business. In another case, a domain of a client expired and they worked to purchase it back from a domain holding company.
Research
Before I just put the domains up for sale I did a little research. From what I could find there were a few methods that were available to choose from. I found the major listings from both google and webforms. There are also a few tools that will place a value on your domain
- Nokta Domains : They facilitate buying and selling domains, as well as leasing. I ran a valuation on both domains.
- Godaddy Auctions: This is the section where Godaddy charges you a monthly fee to be a member and list your domain at auction.
- Sedo – They offer full service for domain selling and auction. They can broker deals and also help find information. Cost can range from 10-20% of sale
- Flippa – This site allows for domain purchasing and selling. Also, offer full websites, apps, and online businesses.
To sell my domains I realized that there are a few options to choose from
Selling my Domains
I decided to initially start out with Sedo. I setup an account and moved my domains using their easy to use instructions to a parked domain and added a price. I let this work for about 1 month and really did not get much traction. They offer auctions and other services to move the purchase. I was too passive and realized that I wanted to try another service. I have to say that the Sedo instructions and site are easy to use.
Next test was to use flippa. I have been watching and have purchased a site using flippa. Before I started my Flippa auction I decided to take a different approach for one of my domains. The two domains in question are:
My approach was to look at the methods available from Flippa. The options when you start an auction from flippa are to have: Domain only, new website, or established website.
I wanted to two of the options. For imobilevpn.com I selected “a brand-new website” and for strongervpn.net I selected domain only. I quickly set about moving the imobilevpn from the Sedo parked domain over to my own implementation of a parked domain. I left the sedo park page for strongervpn.net
For imobilevpn.net i created a quick WordPress landing page and added Google adwords and also Google analtyics. I wanted to see how much traffic was being sent to the site.
I submitted the auctions a few days apart and waited to see what happened.
Imobilevpn price was set for $99 and a reserve price of 150. I was basically seeing if I could sell it. (this is a promotional widget that flippa gives you at a selling tool)
Prior to the listing I did a few price valuations on different sites. This one from nokta shows the valuation as $4000. Others ranked the price around $200 or $300. There was a pretty large variance.
Conclusion
So what happened. In the end, I added a buy it now on both auctions and did not get any bids or purchases. I am going to run this again, but will probably lower the price. Flippa was a good test, I think I’ll move to try the next version.
All along, the flippa experience was good. I had expected a difference between a “new website” and just a domain but both performed the same. About 4 people watching the auctions and no comments. If you look at some of the domains for sale on flippa you will see examples of comments / questions.
I realize that I had a niche domain name, but it is also a popular topic and service at the moment. I did not sell anything yet, but I will update as I go along. Anyone want to buy a domain name.