UK based after market site?

[Edwin]

Originally Posted by bb99

Wouldn't it be great if Nominet did it?

Yes. What a brilliant use of some of the surplus from the 1- and 2-letter auction, if one takes place. Build the killer sales platform, with the added rock-solid reassurance that it's the Registry behind the scenes i.e. there won't be any hanky-panky with transfers and ownership changes.

Could force people to log into their Nominet management account to select/list names for sale, thus guaranteeing that the owners of the domains are also the people listing them! This could activate an extra flag in the Whois with a link straight to the for-sale page on Nominet's sales platform.

And the development of a vibrant, 100% cast-iron trustworthy aftermarket will do wonders to push the overall adoption of .co.uk domains. Nominet will be able to publish sales and enquiry stats, top sales, etc. and will easily drive home the message that decent .co.uk names are well worth paying for...

... and that in turn will lift the entire domain industry in the UK, as well as doing wonders for the credibility of resellers.

[Edwin]

Originally Posted by foz

I wouldn't want to see that level of commission taken (I'm comfortable at 10%) and ultimately the up-taker to the challenge would want to carve out as much market share as possible as a "Registrar".

The tradeoff is more commission for more distribution. Smaller partners will accept a lower commission. Huge partners, like Godaddy - which will get the domains in front of millions of potential customers through their Whois system - demand a higher cut but in return dramatically increase the probability of a sale.

Better to give away a 35% slice of regular sales than 10% of nothing because nobody found the domain tucked away on an obscure registrar (DDN is integrated at the registration/whois lookup level)

[foz]

Originally Posted by Skinner

Maybe give matt from DM a PM and point him to this thread, maybe he will bring it up in meetings and see what comes ?

Linked from another DM thread.

[GreyWing]

Well I am sure they will have the good will of the rest of us and we'll all do everything we can to help them with it.

I certainly hope they make it happen.

[foz]

Originally Posted by Edwin

The tradeoff is more commission for more distribution. Smaller partners will accept a lower commission. Huge partners, like Godaddy - which will get the domains in front of millions of potential customers through their Whois system - demand a higher cut but in return dramatically increase the probability of a sale.

Better to give away a 35% slice of regular sales than 10% of nothing because nobody found the domain tucked away on an obscure registrar (DDN is integrated at the registration/whois lookup level)

I just don't feel it would be necessary for the .uk market. From what I've heard and seen of DDN it hasn't been a resounding success.

[bb99]

Hmm - if it was done by Nominet, it could be fed through to all the registrars via the DAC. So if you're checking the availability but it's registered (and it's for sale), the DAC also returns the fact it's on the aftermarket and the price.

So all the big boys like 123, 1&1, etc would have access to the inventory and be able to market to people searching for domains.

It's a win win!

[Edwin]

It's very easy to be generous with money once you have it. If paying a distribution partner 20% or 30% commission means that you sell 10 domains a month instead of 1 (for example) then it could be money well spent. And in the DDN case, as I explained, you get to tweak the commission yourself to suit your level of risk/reward (you get to keep most of the money at a lower level, but risk having few/no sales because the big partners won't list your domains).

If anyone does take on the task of building a Sedo-killer, it would probably be good to set a sensible minimum sale price (e.g. 500 pounds) so that...
A) The site doesn't get too cluttered with absolute junk
B) It starts to establish in visitors' minds that "yes, .co.uk domains really are worth significantly more than regfee" (remember, end users may not be sophisticated enough to make an educated differential between a 50 pound domain and a 5,000 domain, even though to an industry professional the difference is instantly obvious
C) It guarantees a sensible minimum commission for the company running the platform (e.g. 100 pounds minimum commission if it's set at 20%), and that in turn should anchor better support and hand-holding (which all costs money, lots of it!) during the sales process. It would also fund more pro-active marketing to promote the availability of better names.

But the #1 differential, as I said earlier, must be selectivity: as soon as you open the floodgates and accept every name no matter how lousy, you've set in motion an avalanche that is going to end up burying potential buyers in mountains of junk names (as happens on all the major aftermarket sites that have no listing quality qualifiers in place).

Perhaps one option would be to introduce a listing fee, e.g. 10 pounds per domain. That should be sufficient deterrent to keep the worst dregs out of the market, while not inconveniencing the holders of decent portfolios in the slightest.

[Edwin]

Originally Posted by bb99

Hmm - if it was done by Nominet, it could be fed through to all the registrars via the DAC. So if you're checking the availability but it's registered (and it's for sale), the DAC also returns the fact it's on the aftermarket and the price.

So all the big boys like 123, 1&1, etc would have access to the inventory and be able to market to people searching for domains.

It's a win win!

Yep, that's a perfectly credible scenario. And if the registrar that brings the buyer gets a cut of the proceeds (e.g. by credits offset against their Nominet billing, with cash payment adjustments if necessary) then that's a huge incentive for registrars to cooperate.

The bigger the registrar, the larger the potential payoff. Done really well, the aftermarket revenue share that a large registrar was entitled to might even come to dwarf their registration/renewal fee revenue - and it's 100% "found money" as they would have to do almost nothing at all to claim their share of it, except for tweak their Whois/registration process a little to account for the possibility of names being indicated as for sale on the aftermarket.

So instead of an available/registered indication, they would provide an available/for sale/registered indication - with the "for sale" taking clients over to Nominet's central platform for the sale.

[j13]

Originally Posted by Edwin

So instead of an available/registered indication, they would provide an available/for sale/registered indication - with the "for sale" taking clients over to Nominet's central platform for the sale.

they have something like this over at eurodns, so if you search a domain it comes up with unavailable/available or a link though to sedo if its for sale there.

[philiporchard]

Originally Posted by Edwin

If anyone does take on the task of building a Sedo-killer...

What kind of investment would it take from us, to fund a software build of this size?