Big fanfare announcement earlier today: Afternic will be offering lease to own options.
Awesome. Thanks for copying Dan.com, finally. It would be great if that were done independently, without buying and taking apart Dan.com.
But it is what it is: Dan.com is a GoDaddy asset, and GoDaddy can (ab)use it to their heart’s content.
Meanwhile, Product Update #9 that was posted today by Dan.com seems to contain changes that fly under the radar.
For starters, say goodbye to sharing information about your domain buyers, as sellers and buyers will transact directly with Undeveloped BV, the Dutch company that operates Dan.com. Invoices will therefore contain minimal information and perhaps neither party will be able to know any information about the other.
Dan.com calls this “simplification” and we call it one big fat stupid change. Additionally, this leads to the charging of the European VAT for all domain sales of European sellers, regardless of the buyer’s locale, as Undeveloped BV will be the engaging party. That’s 21% tax on average, depending on the seller’s country.
Moving on.
There is now a thing called “commission discount” on a sliding scale, as long as these are lease to own transactions. It looks like this:
Prior to that, the seller had nothing to do with the buyer’s fees. The 12 month LTO period provided 0% fee to the buyer, who will be paying how much now?
Dan.com does not disclose that and the old LTO table was removed from use as of today, without any warning. All we remember is that at 60% months the buyer was paying an effective 30% in fees and the buyer paid nothing.
In a nutshell: Dan.com is becoming increasingly irrelevant as a marketplace with Afternic cloning its functionality. At least, it seems that unlike the case with Uniregistry, the process is taking place really fast.
