Yesterday I purchased a domain at Afternic which was advertised at BIN and MAKE OFFER and I decided not to fool around with an offer because I wanted no hiccups acquiring the domain. Since the domain resolved to a GoDaddy lander I decided to proceed forward and below is my experience from a customers point of view instead of a domainers point of view.
EXPERIENCE
- I thought the domain sat at GoDaddy (I should have checked) but it actually sat at Dynadot so as a client one would think with a full GoDaddy lander that the domain actually sits at GoDaddy.
- I picked BIN so I expected checkout to go smooth, it logged me into my godaddy account as expected but after I added my credit card (which I remove from GoDaddy to prevent additional charges) the REVIEW button was greyed out. Try as I may, I double checked all fields, Google charged me a $2 preliminary charge to verify my card so I knew it was valid. I reloaded disabling my Adguard but nothing I did got the button into black where I could submit. I went to my downstairs computer and repeated the process with the same results and I figured I must be banned from purchasing at Godaddy. As a last resort I tried on my Pixel Phone and the transaction went smooth the button was black and I was able to purchase from my regular GoDaddy account.
- NOW... There was very little communication with GoDaddy, I got an email (image at top) which was the only communication. When I clicked the button it took forever to load and at this point I still thought the domain was at GoDaddy so try as I may I could not get to DNS, all I was able to get to was MANAGE and from there on they said I had a free page, get email, get this service, get that service, and each page was slower to load than the next. I went to manage domain on the left and it said I had no domains. At this point I realized it probably sat at another registrar but a regular client would have no idea and would start to panic. Any link I clicked went to more and more services offered and I get lost. I closed the browser and went back to my email to click back into my purchase page. I did this multiple multiple times because each time I got to Godaddy it would direct me someplace else for a service I did not want.
- Eventually I gave up and I figured it would take up to 7 days but I knew Dynadot had fast transfer so I was hoping it would come sooner and sure enough after about 6 hours the domain was in my account and I was able to direct name servers. I got a nice GoDaddy email which was a positive.
My absolute biggest complaint is there was ZERO communication after the first email and if I were an inexperienced end user I would have wondered where my domain was. All I got was pages and pages of Buy this, buy that and nothing that said I would receive my domain after 7 days or 1 day which it was in this case. As an end user I was blind.
I can say with the utmost of clarity that I would not put my end user through this type of setup and spaceship is getting similar now with their brightly colored addon buttons on checkout.
I had no idea how discombobulated the checkout process actually was and the one thing I know for sure is there has to be a better way. Anything that makes the process harder is a possibility a client may walk away. The GoDaddy checkout is an intensely dissatisfying experience with spaceship on the same track.
I know SAW and DomainEasy have a much smoother process and I might work with SAW on a couple of mock sales just to see the actual end process.
So how was your day?
Last edited:
