As if checking out via a slow cart weren’t enough for GoDaddy domain buyers of its Afternic inventory, you can now add upselling to the process.
In recent months, users have reported that it can take up to 30 seconds from the moment a BIN-priced domain is added to the cart until the next step, payment, is ready to complete. That amount of time has varied and while it appears to have come down in recent days, an extra step has been added: upselling services.
Adding insult to injury, GoDaddy believes that even when users pay a premium price to acquire a domain, as opposed to registering one costing $22.99 at going registration prices, they still need to be nickeled and dimed with add-ons.
Here’s what happens when one hits the “Get it” button and then the “Next” button that appears in its place:
Instead of completing the sale and THEN providing a list of add-on services, such as the free (for now) GoDaddy Airo builder and Microsoft email storage, GoDaddy halts the flow of the transaction while things are happening in the back-end.
We have very little doubt that the extra step serves two purposes: Attempts to upsell add-on services and splits the long process time into approximately half.
In other words, the checkout process is still long for whatever reason; by introducing this extra step it’s actually longer but it happens through additional interaction with the domain buyer.
Smart or dumb?
Whatever the goal is, this is not what domain investors selling domains—and not extra services—are expecting from the platform.
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