Potential issue with Dan sales of Uni/GoDaddy domains

I’ve been using Dan.com with great success in the past two years and its acquisition by GoDaddy was disappointing.

The Dutch start-up was about to roll out its own domain registrar, as a white label of Metaregistrar BV. A domain registrar/marketplace combo had tremendous potential; it also posed extreme danger to GoDaddy: Dan.com was already stealing Afternic’s lunch involving domain sales.

On top of that, the acquisition of Uniregistry by GoDaddy led to the eventual shutting down of both the Uni Market and Uni, the domain name registrar. A forced transition to GoDaddy completed without any issues, except for some pricing inconsistency which was taken care of once I was assigned an account manager.

That being said, there’s a potential issue with sales of former Uni-registered domains that were moved to GoDaddy, when these sales take place on Dan.com.

A couple of days ago I closed on a sale of a domain I registered 20 years ago. The exchange took 4 steps: Offer, my counter-offer, the buyer’s increased offer, and me accepting it. As usual, Dan.com’s “bot” took over the exchange and I was asked whether I wanted to push the domain at Uniregistry, or transfer the domain via an auth code.

That’s the point that I considered problematic: The domain is managed at GoDaddy and not Uniregistry, although apparently Dan.com believes it’s still at Uniregistry.

If you’re confused, so was I.

As the domain portfolio transition from Uni to GoDaddy took place without an actual transfer of registrar, the domains are at Uniregistry still, per the WHOIS. However, these domains are now managed at GoDaddy and there is no Uniregistry account that controls them. Therefore, no Uni(registry) push can take place.

I believe I made the right choice by selecting the “auth code” transfer option, instead of the “Uniregistry push” one. The transfer to Metaregistrar BV took about 30 minutes to complete and payment credit was issued promptly.

This type of automated completion of domain sales is superb and it beats any other existing models at Afternic for example. I wish they paid using ACH for US customers instead of bank wire but that’s the way it is.

In a nutshell: If you sell your former Uni domains that are now managed by the GoDaddy interface at Dan.com, you might be better off selecting the “transfer out” option to avoid any potential complications.