I tested various parameters while with DC, these tests were run on 50,000 domains. Over a period of three months in three countries, UK, Germany and USA.
In my experience if you price it you may under sell, if you don’t you may lose the sale.
While most of us hope that the bidder is gonna pay record prices it rarely happens, how often can you say you felt you could of got more for it? We were selling thousands of domains every year and although I felt I was losing potential margins I discovered the best approach was to establish your actual value, one that you would painstakingly accept after a hard negotiation. Now divide your domains into three categories.
1. Fixed Price - domains valued at less than £300
2. Nearest offer - domains valued at £300 +
3. Too good - Not sure - domains valued at £1,000 +
• Now take the BIN category, add 50% and set on Fixed Price. If, 3 months before the renewal, the domains has not sold reduce the price to your original BIN price and decide if you want to renew it and reduce accordingly.
• Now take the Nearest offer category, add 300% and set on make offer showing price (Min offer = your original price) if you get a bid you already know you may have accepted it so now you can have fun in the negotiation. Remember the displayed price means your bidder feels your expectations are high yet if he can get it for less they will be happy. You on the other hand have already reached your min expectations.
• I just love it - Make offer no price. Min bid £1,000. Decide on the day what you think it is worth...
This set up was rolled out on 200,000 domains, over 70% were on fixed price. We watched a substantive boost in the fixed price sales take place and, as we had less work to do on the low value negotiations, we were able to make greater margins on our other two sectors. IN all our income jumped our work load decreased and we could take the time on the proactive selling of the premium domains. DC had spent years trying to get 100 times the value of every sale and as a result made very little ROI. Sedo rolled this method out to all Registrar accounts and as a thank you the registrars allowed us to list our domains for sale on their sites…”Multi Listing Service” was born or SedoMLS as it is now known
One thing that is very important is that a fixed price domain leaves the buyer with no other options, they are either in or out. I was surprised at the difference in sales achieved if i took the option to negotiate away. 3 months before renewal we would drop the prices drastically.
Other things to consider - Price fluctuations:
Why not raise your prices in the Summer and reduce them in the winter.
Increase prices in the holidays
Yes we tested this too, did you know that many of your domains may be getting watched by someone via the Sedo platform. "watch list" there is a rule in place that if the domain price is reduced by more than 10% the watcher will be informed. So raise your prices occasionally and drop them again, do this in line with the seasons or holiday periods (Statistically more sales achieved in bad weather than good weather) so to boost the slow periods make every sale count.