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HOW NOT TO SELL A DOMAIN

I received an offer on a domain name a few days ago from a NetSol email saying “accept offer or give a counter offer”. Well, the original offer for the domain was weak, so I replied what my BIN price was. I received a counter offer that was less than half of my BIN. However, I was willing to cut my BIN and give a secondary counter offer that might make the buyer happy and complete the deal.

Believe it or not, my willingness wasn’t good enough, according to NetSol.  I couldn’t find away to respond with my second counter offer.

So I called NetSol customer service: (1.800.333.7680 ) and reached a very tired and frustrated woman who did not want to deal with the “issue” of selling my domain name. “I’m sorry, but we don’t allow second counter offers from the seller.”  So I asked what I should do to give a second counter offer.

“I can’t give you any further help, I just know that there are no secondary counter offers from sellers in our site,”  she said. Basically, it’s a “one-two step” process with the powerful registrar known as “Network Solutions”.  If someone makes a weak offer on your domain, you reply with your BIN price. They counter back, and if it’s close, but not good enough, you can’t respond with “Add a few more $$$$ and I’ll sell.”

Basically, the tired and unhappy female voice on the phone was telling me,  “We don’t have a “secondary counter offer” system in place for the sellers to counter back with a lower offer.”

I informed her that I just wanted to give a slightly higher amount than the first counter offer by the intended buyer, but lower than my original BIN. She stated firmly again “We don’t allow secondary counter offers in the system. How else can I help you?”

Arrrgggh!!  In other words, if someone uses NetSol to contact you to buy a domain (even one that you don’t have registered at NetSol), then NetSol will send you their FIRST offer, then if you say, “No thanks, here’s what my BIN is,” and then the potential buyer returns an offer closer to your BIN, you have to either accept it or say “no deal”.  There is no feature on NetSol to allow the seller to second counter a BIN price to the buyer. Really.

With all that power and money and they don’t have the ability to close domain sales easily where both parties are happy? Sad.

So, I have an offer just a few hundred dollars lower than what I’ll sell the domain for, but at least $1000 less than what I was asking. However, I can’t give that counter offer to the interested buyer because NetSol, in all their glory, haven’t seen the usefulness of a Sedo style bidding system. The big laugh is that Net Sol doesn’t understand that they’re probably losing over 50% or more of their refcomms on domains they could be brokering. They are losing money.

I asked for a followup phone call from a supervisor in order to present a price I think the interested buyer might go for. I will update this article to let you know how it worked out. I’m ending this article dated Friday 6/16/09.   I’ll begin again once I hear back from NetSol on how they will handle this potential sale. It’s already been three weeks. No response. Their buyer doesn’t realize they could have had the domain they wanted for just a few hundred dollars more (about 20% more than what they originally countered).

For now, my overall view of Network Solutions hasn’t changed. They are a tumbling corporate domain behemoth with no idea of how to feed itself properly with legitimate sales methods. And, just like GoDaddy, when was the last time you saw anyone from NetSol representing themselves at a domain conference, or even answering concerns on the many great blogs on domaining? It reminds me of the stories of powerful companies, hotels, even theaters, that haughtily put their noses in the air and thought the good times would never end for them…