We’ve been comparing five big domain marketplaces – Afternic, Flippa, GoDaddy, NameJet and Sedo – to gauge their ability to deliver a web site that provides ease of navigation and efficient content presentation.
User experience (UX) design is a fundamental element of any web site that aspires to attract and maintain the loyalty of its visitors.
After Afternic and Flippa, today is the turn of GoDaddy Auctions.
One of the main differences between GoDaddy Auctions and other domain selling venues, is that GoDaddy is also a domain registrar; in fact, it is the biggest domain registrar in the world.
With that in mind, GoDaddy Auctions clearly benefits from that relationship, promoting its registrar and web hosting services whenever possible, and there’s nothing wrong with that approach.
When it comes down to the presentation of GoDaddy Auctions, we are greeted by the top navigation mast, split over three visually distinct zones:
At the very top, a settings zone allows visitors to set their locale and currency, provides info to contacting the GoDaddy customer service, and provides access to log into one’s account, along with the shopping cart.
The next zone contains the GoDaddy brand, along with a navigation to the satellite services GoDaddy wants to sell you, such as domains, web sites, hosting and SSL certificates and other deals. Brilliant.
The last zone – in green – guides one to the auctions, where they can browse, list or further peruse the auctions.
That entire top section is packed with information and options, but does so efficiently and without wasting premium real estate.
Moving on to the next segment, the Search box and assorted tools.
There is an ample sized search box that allows visitors to input keywords, or move onto the “Advanced Search”; there are tabbed segments for My Auctions Account, Selling List, Bidding List, Settings and Advanced Search, all of which lead to other pages via the use of drop down menus. The bottom part of that segment is for filtering results: by Popular Searches, setting the number of results and an option to save and tweak these settings per account as well.
It’s a very efficient display of what would otherwise be a sea of options – that do exist in secondary pages – without overwhelming the visitor.
Browsing a list of Featured Domains or Most Active auctions is the next logical step, and that area – despite occupying more than a screen in height – is visually effective. It can also be tweaked per the previous segment, thus shortening the amount of information displayed.
With that in mind, GoDaddy Auctions really manages to deliver as much or as little info from its inventory that the visitor is comfortable with, and that is an important element in how we classify and rank domain selling venues.
The final segment of the GoDaddy Auctions landing page is once again dedicated to providing an intuitive guide to their domain auctions and assorted services.
One call-to-action graphic provides the tech support number, with is available 24/7.
The full navigational interface is comprehensive and uncluttered, providing access to corporate information, Support, Resources, Account information and Shopping services.
There’s a footer zone to sign up for the GoDaddy newsletter and to download the GoDaddy app from the Apple Store or Google Play, along with links to social media accounts.
So how does the GoDaddy Auctions web site rank in terms of design, user experience, ease of navigation and overall presentation of domain inventory?
Here are the rankings for GoDaddy Auctions, available from auctions.godaddy.com :
Design: 9/10
User Experience: 9/10
Ease of Navigation: 10/10
Inventory Presentation: 10/10
Overall Ranking: 9.5/10
GoDaddy Auctions achieves an almost perfect score thanks to the amount of information it presents intelligently, without unnecessary elements. There is no waste of screen real estate and there are options for the visitor to tweak the output. It’s a great evolution of a platform that manages a large domain inventory daily.
One improvement Go Daddy could make:
Easier navigation to actual listings.
When I place my listing URLs on my site, it takes three clicks to get to snag the full URL for my sales site.
It’s not a big deal for me — I have gotten pretty fast at extracting what I need — but I can only imagine how confusing it could be for potential buyers.
Thanks for the write up on the auctions. If anyone wants to direct customers to their listings they can use this link and replace “domainname.com” at the end with the domain you are trying to point people to. https://auctions.godaddy.com/trpItemListing.aspx?domain=domainname.com