Wanted: Domain Appraisal Pier/co/uk

wonder_lander · Sep 24, 2012

OK some back history for the domain. The Pier (Retail) Limited was a high street and online homewares retailer (similar to habitat) that went into administration in late 2008. Following the dissolving of the company earlier this year I contacted nominet to get them to suspend the domain and although I failed to catch the domain I won it on auction at Domainlore.

There are around 170,000 back links from 3000 domains according to MajesticSEO and the site is getting approx 1700 - 2000 visitors per month.

I'm wondering if you kind folks would offer up your opinion on a value on the domain and also a suggestion as to what to do with the traffic that is currently being wasted by landing on my "contact us" page.

martin-s · Sep 24, 2012

How about an affiliate site selling stuff similar to the Pier used to? Keep it simple

Bailey · Sep 24, 2012

martin-s said:
How about an affiliate site selling stuff similar to the Pier used to? Keep it simple

Sounds like the best-idea. At least you shouldn't have a problem as Passing-off on the face of it

namealot · Sep 25, 2012

Surprised a company that’s not been trading years online is going to have that much traffic? You assume it closed due to lack of hits to sales ratio etc ?

I’d research and see if that’s actually what there looking for ?
As you've just bought it on a public auction then say thats often a pretty good indicator the value ?

Edwin · Sep 25, 2012

Are those real visitors or bot visitors? I've found in the past that some domains which retain an old link profile get a ton of visits from search engine spiders (not just the biggies like Google, Yahoo, Bing, but thousands of minor ones) but not necessarily from humans...

wonder_lander · Sep 25, 2012

Edwin said:
Are those real visitors or bot visitors? I've found in the past that some domains which retain an old link profile get a ton of visits from search engine spiders (not just the biggies like Google, Yahoo, Bing, but thousands of minor ones) but not necessarily from humans...

Good question, what's the easiest way to verify?

wonder_lander · Sep 25, 2012

Here are some of the analytics data

Overview

Sources Overview

Organic Search

Referrals

Edwin · Sep 25, 2012

wonder_lander said:
Good question, what's the easiest way to verify?

Study your log files. It's not a perfect solution, but if you collect a few thousand log entries then sort them alphabetically you should start to see repetitive patterns and those are likely to be bots. Many bots also identify themselves as such...

Of course, depending on what analytics solution you're using, most of the bots may already have been factored out. That's especially true if you're using a remote Javascript solution like Google Analytics (whereas something like Webalizer or Analog that runs on your server will lump everything together)

Edwin · Sep 25, 2012

You beat me to it! Those look like real visitors, and it looks like the brand continues to live on in peoples' memories long after the firm behind it went bust...

wonder_lander · Sep 25, 2012

namealot said:
Surprised a company that’s not been trading years online is going to have that much traffic? You assume it closed due to lack of hits to sales ratio etc ?

I’d research and see if that’s actually what there looking for ?
As you've just bought it on a public auction then say thats often a pretty good indicator the value ?

I suspect it was more an issue of their high street stores that brought the company down if I'm honest. It was at a time when a lot of high street retailers were going to the wall.

As you'll see from the analytics data it looks like the visitors are indeed looking for the company and products that the pier sold.

With regards to value I wouldn't expect a domainlore auction would be a good indication of the real world value of a domain due to the limited amount of people who use the site.

wonder_lander · Sep 25, 2012

martin-s said:
How about an affiliate site selling stuff similar to the Pier used to? Keep it simple

Bailey said:
Sounds like the best-idea. At least you shouldn't have a problem as Passing-off on the face of it

Hmm, I've got a Fresh Store Builder license I could use to throw something up quickly but I'm worried that in doing so I may actually harm the rankings it's currently got.

Any thoughts on that?

wonder_lander · Sep 25, 2012

Edwin said:
You beat me to it! Those look like real visitors, and it looks like the brand continues to live on in peoples' memories long after the firm behind it went bust...

My interest in the domain came after we bought the-pier.co.uk in 2002 to use as our personal e-mail address. We lived in Brighton at the time and with it's 2 piers it sounded like a great domain.

In 2006 we were approached by The Pier (Retail) to buy the domain from us but they were only offering £100 and as I say we were using the domain for our personal e-mail.

In early 2008 I actually began developing the-pier.co.uk into a resource about UK piers and through that noticed we were getting people coming to our site looking for this other company.

pete · Sep 25, 2012

I didn't realise they'd even gone bust - I guess a lot of others don't know either!

You could go with setting up a store selling the kind of products they used to sell ie highly overpriced wooden furniture.

You may need to look into issues surrounding "passing off based on residual goodwill" which could come up if there is still a trade mark floating around. I found an old post - http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=37812 that covers some of this.

In the end it depends on how much of a risk you want to take. I wouldn't invest a fortune into developing a furniture retail site without investigating all the legal issues but I would probably throw up a quick site to see what the interest is like.

With regards to any rankings - I'd of though that sticking up a relevant site would do a lot better than just having the "buy this domain" page. (Also look for deep links and 404's and redirect these to similar pages on your new site.)

ratboy · Sep 25, 2012

Contact old rival businesses, and lease the domain to them. They will see value in that traffic.

Selling in that market is hard, and affiliate seems to be dead for new(ish) sites.

wonder_lander · Sep 25, 2012

ratboy said:
Contact old rival businesses, and lease the domain to them. They will see value in that traffic.

Selling in that market is hard, and affiliate seems to be dead for new(ish) sites.

I have tried a couple of rivals but no bites! The administrator leased the domain to Denby in 2009 but I've been in contact with them and they aren't interested either.

namealot · Sep 25, 2012

wonder_lander said:
I suspect it was more an issue of their high street stores that brought the company down if I'm honest. It was at a time when a lot of high street retailers were going to the wall.

As you'll see from the analytics data it looks like the visitors are indeed looking for the company and products that the pier sold.

With regards to value I wouldn't expect a domainlore auction would be a good indication of the real world value of a domain due to the limited amount of people who use the site.

With domainlore not that well known with general public but do they buy domains ? ? If your looking to flip to a domainer, developer etc I’d say more well known? if your talking end user then its down to research …?

If you go development (and for a possible buyer) find out who there major suppliers were, If they did well they might be interested or you might be able to strike direct deals better than standard affiliate, Find there best selling, highest % margin products were etc, You have an advantage of traffic, sort of client base but there not sales or revenue yet? A natural start could be refers etc find out the products There are some to start you off
http://www.housetohome.co.uk/search/pier/room_ideas#results
Click on the pics and to the left hand side gives you supplier and product
And wayback
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20050901000000*/http://pier.co.uk
more research you do the more likely of a profit and a likely buyer…?

getmein · Sep 25, 2012

Get on linkedin, find someone who used to work on their online product and suggest a JV. Finding out which products sold well, would be a short cut to success.