Dan.com was a strong competitor to Afternic, before it was acquired by GoDaddy. In Jamie Zoch’s words, Dan was “eating Afternic’s lunch” at the time that GoDaddy shelled out $71.4 million dollars in cash to acquire the domain selling platform.
Since then, a lot of water has passed under the digital bridge and Dan.com continues to be a popular domain selling platform, tweaked to promote GoDaddy and interface with Afternic.
The process isn’t perfect and we recently identified a couple of glitches related to the Dan/Afternic price syncing. That issue appears to have been addressed, although sometimes a “ghost” listing of a Dan domain appears on Afternic – more below.
In that sense, there are a few things we’d like to see Dan.com improve on, even as an extension to Afternic’s perpetuity into beta.
Firstly, there are occasions that create a ghost listing on Afternic: When adding a BIN to a domain at Dan.com, a notification is returned that the domain already exists on Afternic, although there is no such listing when searching Afternic.com. The solution is to open a ticket at Dan.com.
Second, Dan.com would benefit from a sorting of domains within the account by Afternic Status. When one has thousands of domains, it’s impossible to scroll through hundreds of pages to identify these listings that might have failed to sync or update. There is a chance that sorting in this manner was omitted on purpose, as it’d require the processing of live data. Solution: use a buffer server to cache data every so often, which would then be polled for display purposes.
Third, negotiations lock a price down to what was in place when an offer was made. If that offer is declined by the seller and their counter-offer is declined by the buyer or rescinded by the seller, the seller should be able to update the domain’s BIN or asking price up (as well as down) which is currently not the case.
Dan.com provides exceptional customer support that work during Europe’s business hours and during US hours as well. Even though it’s via chat only, the nice folks at Dan.com resolve most issues instantly and update domain sellers with the results.
If you believe there are other, important points that Dan.com needs to improve on, feel free to share them in the comments.
if gd bought Dan because Dan platform is so damn good then why don’t gd integrate into dan rather than destroying it???
mind boggling
mind boggling
Thanks, Theo – this is constructive and I’ll make sure this is fed back.
bring back the self directed uni platform, one of the best platforms ever, and it got shelved, why?
Would like to see Categories port to the Domain Seller’s page and provide another way to search within the Seller’s portfolio. i.e. In addition to extension, length etc. a potential buyer could look through the seller’s categories to find names. Ideally the (seller’s designated) Category would be included in each individual listing so that by clicking on the category in the listing you’d see a list of all similar names in the Seller’s portfolio.
Case: Potential buyer curious about specific short brandable Fashion-related name types into browser and finds it for sale at Dan. Is then able to see other similar names in the Seller’s portfolio by searching category ‘Short Brandable’, for example.
At the moment, >Explore other popular domains from the seller > See more domains, seems to go to a random page of listings. It would be cool if the default page of listings were other names in the same category as the original landing page. Should be able to link to that page of listings as well for sharing.
I don’t have a large portfolio but for those that do I have a sense this would make a difference.
BullS: 🙂
James – Thank you!
mario: Too late, that ship has sailed.
JohnH: Great suggestions!