2023 at Afternic: Lease to Own, Lead Center, Expedited Payouts, and more!

Afternic, the leading domain name marketplace, has been busy throughout 2023, rolling out several significant updates and enhancements that streamline user experience and bolster functionality. Here’s a recap of those updates you need to know about.

Lead Center

Launched in March 2023, the Lead Center offers new access and transparency to brokered inquiries at Afternic. This feature enables sellers to effortlessly track inbound leads that our expert brokers are working on while providing visibility into negotiations.

This central hub, allowing sellers and brokers to discuss offers, has provided new insights to domain sellers on their portfolio performance.

Ownership Verification

Introduced in April 2023, automated ownership verification has significantly reduced the time required for sellers to add listed domain names to their accounts. Ownership verification, leveraging nameserver or TXT records, eliminates the need for customer service intervention, empowering sellers to spend more time on crucial aspects of portfolio management.

Lander Selection

Before the introduction of Lander Selection in April 2023, transitioning between Afternic’s sale landers involved visiting the domain’s registrar and changing nameservers.

This new feature streamlined the process, allowing sellers to switch between Afternic’s Request Price, Buy It Now, Cashparking, or Dan.com landers within seconds directly from the Afternic portfolio page.

Lease to Own

Lease to Own, introduced with the expertise of Dan.com, offers buyers the option to pay for a domain name over time while allowing sellers to earn recurring income.

Along with the traditional benefits of Lease to Own, domain sellers now gain added exposure through integration with GoDaddy search, promoting Lease to Own as a purchase option on eligible domain names.

If you’re a domain seller who wants to enable Lease to Own at Afternic, you can learn more about enabling the service.

Expedited Payouts

Responding to seller feedback for faster payouts, Afternic introduced a new process in July 2023 in an effort to pay domain name sellers earlier. This system aims to reduce the average payout time by up to 50%, facilitating quicker reinvestment of funds from domain sales and supporting a faster reinvestment cycle.

To see which transactions expedited payouts cover, read our blog post.

Custom Checkout Link

For sellers negotiating outbound or external domain sales, Custom Checkout Link allows access to GoDaddy’s transaction assurance flow for Buy Now sales of $99 or more, and Lease to Own deals up to $100,000 and up to a 12-month term. This feature, utilizing Dan’s technology, facilitates importing leads into GoDaddy’s platform with low commission fees, enabling sellers to create custom terms for their external sale.

Visitor Statistics

Launched in November 2023, Visitor Statistics provides domain sellers with insights into their domain’s performance, offering traffic stats for the last 30 days, with more in-depth statistics available, too. This feature equips sellers with valuable data for informed decisions on pricing and renewals.

XYZ and IO Join Fast Transfer

In December 2023, Afternic expanded its Fast Transfer network to include popular extensions .xyz and .io. The network provides extensive exposure to eligible domain names across its network, gaining 85 million searches per month.

Some Updates You May Have Missed

Here are three important updates from this year that you may have missed.

TLS Support

With browsers switching to https by default, Afternic is in the process of rolling out TLS (Transport Layer Security) support for traffic to all of our landers, providing a better experience for visitors to domain landers.

To check if your domain name has been enabled for TLS support yet, directly visit your domain name, including an https prefix (for example, https://example.com).

More Exposure for Registry Premium Names

Afternic’s powerful distribution network provides additional exposure for domain names listed at Afternic. For Registry Premium-listed domain names, this exposure previously did not include GoDaddy Auctions and GoDaddy search.

Thanks to tireless behind-the-scenes work between Afternic and GoDaddy Auctions, Registry Premium listings at Afternic will now be syndicated to GoDaddy Auctions and GoDaddy search.

User Experience Redesign

Afternic’s team has continued to transition more of the user experience into the updated 2.0 environment. In 2023, some key areas of the user experience have been upgraded, including account settings and the add domains flow that sellers will regularly encounter.

This user experience work will be coupled with a new Afternic.com Front of Site, which we’re looking forward to releasing in 2024.