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 If that offer is declined by the seller and their counter-offer is declined by the buyer or rescinded by the seller, the seller should be able to update the domain’s BIN or asking price up (as well as down) which is currently not the case.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.
