A praise for Afternic

As a domain investor, I’ve never used Afternic intentionally before to sell domains. It was always due to GoDaddy acquiring Uniregistry and Dan that I got to experience a range of annoying woes of being on the Afternic platform as a domain seller. As a domain buyer, I was far less concerned about the lack of bells and whistles and I did use Afternic for that purpose without any issues.

After deciding to give Afternic a test run for 30 days, I have to say I’m far from being disappointed. The transition of my domain portfolio from Dan to Afternic took place without any major issues, although I had to hand-verify a dozen domains by using my allocated DNS – a trick that Dan used to perfection.

In the two weeks or so since, I’ve had approximately 10 leads and one domain sale. The latter is important because it came from the now defunct Dan.com! I will address this fun incident separately but for now I have to say a couple of things about Afternic support.

Emailing support is a slow process; the first email arrives in 24 hours and will affirm what my issue is. It’s like telling your parents “I have a toothache” and instead of taking you to the dentist they reply “From my understanding your tooth hurts, am I correct?”

Past that point, ticket resolution might take 3-4 days. There is no tracking ticket system per se, unlike most domain industry providers that I have used. This isn’t good as some information should not be responded to via email: financial info or account credentials.

In the case of a recent incident that involved 3 separate issues one of which was an ongoing sale, I decided to use the newly-introduced online chat at Afternic.

After punching in my info and a brief “hello” I waited the better part of an hour before a reply came. Humorously, I said that perhaps I caught them on a lunch break.

Once back, the Afternic customer rep was able to address my issues, after I verified myself – which is important. Vivi addressed my issues in real time and offered solutions and feedback with accuracy and patience. I did not feel that I was just a customer in line, as she spent a good 20 minutes resolving the issues on the spot for me. I highly commend her for the way she interacted with me and it wasn’t hand-holding or patronizing. Of course, I let her do her job and the end result was that issues were addressed and resolved faster than via an email.

Regarding Transaction Assurance they have improved a lot as well and it seems that a Dan “bot” runs in the background checking for domain transfer completion. Either that, or someone was actively working at 10pm confirming my actions to transfer out a domain!

Overall, I am going to display more patience and from my interactions with domain brokers at GoDaddy I am hopeful that the platform will improve more. E.g. where are the Dan filters to drill down different TLDs in one’s portfolio? 🤔

Good work, Afternic. Keep it up.

Comments

  1. Afternic system not updating domain prices properly, if youhave large portfolio that mean you have in trouble with Afternic, when you try to uptade your domain prices, you can see some of them updating, others not. Your Afternic accont display updated prices but BIN landers and GoDady search still displaying old prices….
    After a few days, you see updated prices displaying again old prices… This goes on and on…. Sending many emails… Not sorting… Afternic system has many bugs, visiual glitcs… etc.

    After Afternic says they have “Afternic Boost” affective for all accounts, our domain sales dropped about 70% Yes that is true, and pricing issue is big issue, still waiting to be sorted…

    If you updated your Afternic domains prices, please check them one by one and you will see still old prices on BIN landers…

  2. Alex Dr – I opted out of Afternic boost. I see no issues with price updates currently, not that I do that often. Be aware of a need to sync, it’s not instant and it takes up to 24 hours. The glitch you described was recently addressed by Afternic.

  3. Dear Theo,

    I updated some domains prices 1 week ago, still old prices showing on BIN landers and Afternic support team accepted this, i think currently they are still working on it… Problem is, when they fixed the domain prices, another day domains again showing old prices and we are really pissed off with that. Wasting huge times. You cant imagine, how many emails, how many support chats…etc.
    But I believe they can fix the issue… one day…. but i dont know when…
    When i search this issue in Google, i see some domainers already discussing this, here is the link:
    https://www.namepros.com/threads/afternic-price-changes-not-reflecting-change-at-godaddy-landers-anyone-else-having-this-problem.1337235/

    I am trying to say that, we are not only one, suffering from that issue many days… And still having that problem…

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