Slow Sales This Month? (1 Viewing)

I saw Tony post this on Twitter and it mirrors my experiences from mid-March to now - and that's after a very nice January and February. Anyone else?

All I can say is I've ignored 11 offers under $1000 so far this Month and have only had one solid hit on a Maple Domain which should be closing soon.

It has been many months of dry spell for me, very few inquiries and all under $1000, so no real excitement in quite a while.

My most recent offer on Dan was $750 US a couple of weeks ago, I countered at $1500 and crickets.

In December I had three offers come in on Dan within hours, all different IP's, on three different domains. All under $1000 and no willingness to come up in negotiating. Didn't close any of those.

In the last year or so any action I get seems to come in small bunches and not very often.

So I figure I'm due for something great any time now

I probably have most of my domains on Dan with a min offer of $699 or higher so that keeps out the real lowballers. But I also point some of my domains to my own page with no min offer, and still don't hear much from those either.

domains said:

My most recent offer on Dan was $750 US a couple of weeks ago, I countered at $1500 and crickets.

In December I had three offers come in on Dan within hours, all different IP's, on three different domains. All under $1000 and no willingness to come up in negotiating. Didn't close any of those.

In the last year or so any action I get seems to come in small bunches and not very often.

So I figure I'm due for something great any time now

I probably have most of my domains on Dan with a min offer of $699 or higher so that keeps out the real lowballers. But I also point some of my domains to my own page with no min offer, and still don't hear much from those either.

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Been slow on sales here too, but still good inquiries coming in. I tend to quote high, and there are a handful that are still mulling 5-fig deals. The rest are (as always) thinking they can get one-word domains for $100 to $1000, so they tend to ghost when I quote a price. But I also find that many ghost even if I say make an offer. Maybe it's a domainer trying to figure out who owns the domain or is fishing for pricing info because they have a similar domain.

But this is where having sold many on payment plans pays off, always a bunch of payments coming in each month. One was sold on a trade+cash deal, $25K + a nice one-word .ca domain. The payment plan was designed with a balloon payment after 2 years and now that it is coming due this summer, they're sending me $1K+ random payments multiple times a month in order to pay it off before the balloon is due.

While some will refuse a payment plan on some bizarre principle, others are genuinely appreciative to get a great domain for an affordable monthly price. And when you consider all the never ending monthly business expenses that a business has, versus a finite number of payments into an asset investment, it seems like a pretty easy decision to go with a payment plan rather than a chunk of cash up front. It's like wanting to own your own great office space, rather than renting shitty office space. And at a tiny fraction of the cost of real estate. That is actually a great analogy and I think I'll use it in the future.

Some sellers may worry about the sale not completing, but I've only ever had one not complete the sale, and I was giving a teenager a deal on a domain I didn't care about anyways, and he stopped making the $50/mo payments. The weird thing is he put up a really professional looking website and I was quite impressed.

And if they do make any payments and you end up keeping the domain, that's another bonus in my book.

The only negative I see is making sure you do your homework and that their use is not infringing on any trademarks, and that you have that ability to shut them down if they do.

For a while now I'm thinking the economy must be weighing on domain market activity overall. All the cost pressures today on a business and also having to find money for a domain. There are calls for some kind of recession in 2023, or maybe we're already in it. Despite all that, tech and online business is still advancing and the need for a good domain is always there. One of the great things about domain investing is that things can change in a minute when that new offer shows up in your inbox.

Last summer I agreed to sell a domain to a guy for $10K, but he wanted to pay $1K up front, and pay the rest in a year, if his idea panned out... So I said sure, but I figured he'd probably ghost me in a year, but also figured I'd take the $1K as rent. Since I never saw him actually use the domain, I figured I'd surely just end up keeping the domain. But last night at like 10:30pm he messaged saying he was ready to pay the $9K + tax balance, a couple months early.

So that's another example to always be willing to be creative with payments if you can get your asking price. Or stated better, demand your asking price, but be very flexible on terms. As long as it sounds reasonable, do what works best for the buyer. That may include requiring a down payment though to ensure that if they bail after a month it was worthwhile to you anyways, i.e., no free tasting.

So if you feel like you've hit a negotiating wall, ask the buyer what payment terms would work for them? Consider any combination of a down payment, monthly payments, escalating monthly payments, a balloon payment, etc...

I typically offer free financing options, so that's the form of discount I'm giving them. Yes, I am losing against cost-of-living and future-value-of-money, but I'm ok with that because I set a price I'm happy with, and I like the recurring revenue aspects, and it helps close more deals. Also, I don't generally go more than 2 years out, if someone was requesting like 3+ years of free financing, I'd probably factor in some reasonable interest rate - and that's some incentive for them to try and pay off earlier if possible.

One other caveat, I only offer that when I'm dealing with a legit smallish Canadian business person. If this is a big corporation, then I don't offer any financing. Full payment only. The only reason they'd want financing is to get a cheap taste of using the domain.

There is some great info being posted here, so while I'm glad I started the thread, it still comes down to the same thing for March-April:

I've got enough monthly payment plans coming in now that I really need to get more organized with it as I'm losing track of when people miss a payment. Just got a payment notification for 3 months of payments at $250/mo+gst. I wasn't nagging them, and they just got caught up on their own. I need to automate a system to generate and send out monthly invoices and reminders, as well as a way to check off ones that are received. I know of a new one that has already missed their second payment, I'm sure just oversight by their accounting department. I guess that's next on my todo list. E-transfers are sure great for all this though!

Anyone using any accounting software that does all this for them?

rlm said:

I've got enough monthly payment plans coming in now that I really need to get more organized with it as I'm losing track of when people miss a payment. Just got a payment notification for 3 months of payments at $250/mo+gst. I wasn't nagging them, and they just got caught up on their own. I need to automate a system to generate and send out monthly invoices and reminders, as well as a way to check off ones that are received. I know of a new one that has already missed their second payment, I'm sure just oversight by their accounting department. I guess that's next on my todo list. E-transfers are sure great for all this though!

Anyone using any accounting software that does all this for them?

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You are going to have to hire some employees to keep track of this!

When you are negotiating, does the buyer usually bring up paying in instalments or do you?

When you offer payment plans, what % of potential buyers generally agree to it? Do you do some kind of official legal write up that both parties sign, or is it just a handshake type agreement via email exchange?

I normally just set up Paypal subscriptions. The payments come through automatically, or I get notification if the payment does not come through.

lotsofcoffee said:

I normally just set up Paypal subscriptions. The payments come through automatically, or I get notification if the payment does not come through.

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If only I trusted paypal and didn't despise them so much
They just have too much power and not enough transparency for me to trust my business finances to them.

domains said:

You are going to have to hire some employees to keep track of this!

When you are negotiating, does the buyer usually bring up paying in instalments or do you?

When you offer payment plans, what % of potential buyers generally agree to it? Do you do some kind of official legal write up that both parties sign, or is it just a handshake type agreement via email exchange?

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I don't generally bring up payment plans at first. If it looks like I'm losing them, that's when I offer a payment plan. Often they ghost me, so I follow up with a "I haven't heard back from you, if you're no longer interested, let me know". If they reply with a thanks but no thanks type of message, that's when I pitch the idea of payment plans.

I currently am not doing a full lease-to-own agreement, but I may eventually work that in. So far it hasn't been an issue, I create an invoice, and put some terms into the invoice, and that's been good enough, they pay by e-transfer. When I receive payment, I shoot them an email stating that I confirm the payment has been received, often saying something like "payment #4 of 12 received on 2023-04-16". This way its easy for both parties to check the last email to see when the last payment was made, how many are left, etc...

rlm said:

If only I trusted paypal and didn't despise them so much
They just have too much power and not enough transparency for me to trust my business finances to them.

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I looked at my last 12 .ca sales and all of them were consummated using either e-transfer or certified cheque.

I conduct MapleDots just like my other businesses, I collect tax, I submit tax, I use e-transfer and for larger amounts I take certified cheques.

It is very rare for me to use dan.com as a push because quite honestly I'm too cheap to even give up 5%.
I stopped accepting credit cards because it was costing me 35k a year in fees and that also did not make sense to me.

Right now the only time I use Escrow or dan is when I sell a .com out of country. In Canada I can hunt you down if anything untoward occurs so for me e-transfer and certified cheques/money orders just work.

Oh, and I give them some benefits of a payment plan, as well as noting that these lease-to-own deals are becoming fairly common.

MapleDots said:

I looked at my last 12 .ca sales and all of them were consummated using either e-transfer or certified cheque.

I conduct MapleDots just like my other businesses, I collect tax, I submit tax, I use e-transfer and for larger amounts I take certified cheques.

It is very rare for me to use dan.com as a push because quite honestly I'm too cheap to even give up 5%.
I stopped accepting credit cards because it was costing me 35k a year in fees and that also did not make sense to me.

Right now the only time I use Escrow or dan is when I sell a .com out of country. In Canada I can hunt you down if anything untoward occurs so for me e-transfer and certified cheques/money orders just work.

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Yeah, I would totally do a certified check too, but its kinda archaic... Historically I did a ton of bank wires, but with e-transfers, bank wires are almost extinct, other than receiving them from Escrow.com or Dan.

rlm said:

Yeah, I would totally do a certified check too, but its kinda archaic.

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It's actually still one of the best way to sell to a business, they love using cheques because it leaves a paper trail.

I still have my big business cheque book binder with two rows of checks.
I often write business cheques because they can now be very electronically deposited.

domains said:

When you offer payment plans, what % of potential buyers generally agree to it?

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About 25% of my sales are payment plans. But because they are over the course of a year or two, they tend to start accumulating. Hopefully I'll keep adding new payment plans to replace the ones that are being paid off.

rlm said:

About 25% of my sales are payment plans. But because they are over the course of a year or two, they tend to start accumulating. Hopefully I'll keep adding new payment plans to replace the ones that are being paid off.

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That is a huge percentage - congrats!

Congrats @rlm

Only got 1 LTO sale from DAN