Wouldn’t it be great to be in control of your domain sales? I mean, wouldn’t you like to skip all the commissions and BS that goes along with listing your domain with a 3rd party seller? What if all of your domains could have their own landing page / sales page? What if you could point your domains to your own server, choose to receive offers on your domains or list them as “Buy it Now” and handle the transactions through Escrow.com or Paypal?
Alright, that’s a lot of questions and clearly I am getting to something here. Meet Ed de Jong, owner of Pixor Media. I met Ed years ago through DomainBoardRoom.com and have worked with him on many projects. He’s designed and redesigned many sites for me over the years. Ed is a talented WordPress developer and one of his recent creations is the Domain Sales Theme. It’s impressive!
Here’s the low down in a nut shell. The Domain Sales Theme allows you to setup your domain portfolio on a master domain where users can search your inventory. It also allows you to provide a sales landing page that allows you to take offers or use instant “buy it now” transactions. If you want, you can even require users to pay a small fee to submit an offer, cutting down on all the non-serious inquiries. The ability to complete the transactions through Escrow is built into the theme!
I’m in the process of setting this up, but to provide an example, here is a parent domain that’s using the theme.
The page can be customized to suit your needs. From here, users can view your domain categories by selecting the “Categories” link.
Select a category and view all the names in that category. Then select the name that interests you. You’ll be directed to that domain with it’s sales page where you can make an offer.
The beauty of this is that every domain you own can quickly be setup with a stand alone landing page, just by adding it through the main site. You can get your entire inventory of domain names setup with their own sales pages in no time. Then you are in complete control. No brokers or third party platforms to work through.
There are some server requirements you have to work within (VPS or Dedicated hosting with cpanel), but there are several hosting companies that have very affordable hosting plans, such as HostGator.
If you decide to pick up the theme, let me know what you think in the comments or shoot me an email.
7 comments
Mike, nice article but why would anyone choose this product over Efty?
@Joshua, sounds like I need to review Efty in a future post as well. The first thing that jumps out at me is Efty has a monthly fee as opposed to a one time fee. But I will certainly dig deeper.
Mike, true there is a monthly (or discounted yearly) fee for Efty but there’s also a monthly or yearly fee for hosting if you choose to go with DST. So either way you’re paying a fee for the service. But yes I’d love to see an article on Efty too and see your comparison. PS I’m not affiliated with Efty, I’m just an user and a fan.
I think that the famous saying “Never put all your eggs in one basket” applies here. While one should not rely on a single listing somewhere to sell a domain, they also shouldn’t rely on a single landing/sales page. I think it would be beneficial to have landing pages and listings working together for the same common goal of selling a domain.
I like to develop all my domains, but I know that’s not always possible for most people. So landing pages could be a semi-solution to that. The pages may not do all that great in search engines like a fully developed domain would, but it at least provides something for visitors to see and a chance to be found in search for a keyword phrase.
Hi Joshua,
This is Ed de Jong, I can tell you why you could choose DST over Efty ….
One key differentiator compared to Efty is full control, using Efty is just that, you use it, you don’t own it.
Taking ownership of DST by purchasing a copy and setting things up on your own server means you’re in the driver’s seat.
You have a tool to literally build your own domain sales platform, with the possibility that you can adapt the software (since it’s a WordPress based solution ) if you want to do something different design wise or functionality wise.
Added to that, I can tell you what Efty does not offer at this point to my knowledge:
Efty does not allow you to collect payments from a user just to initiate negotiations.
You don’t have an option to show a sales video on your landing pages.
There is no integration with Clearbit.com or other similar service that can provide you more information beyond just an IP address.
Efty is not as flexible customisation wise in regards to adding your own ideas for landing page designs or features.
That’s why I like to use a solution like DST as it allows me not to be limited by someone else.
Ed, thanks for your explanation of your new product. That definitely helped me understand the differentiating factors between the two platforms mentioned before. I’ll have to give DTS a further look. Congrats on your new product btw!
If you have a BIN for a domain you can put the Escrow.com code in with that price for a buyer to click and initiate a purchase.
You can put a PayPal BIN coded click link into your html
You can ns redirect all domains to dump to one domain that is developed out with a contact form and a list of available domains.
You can .htaccess reroute
your domains to one spot
to showcase contact info
and a form.
You can do one site with categories to mention the other domains you have
and purchasing instructions.
You can create banners for your names and stick them into a DOTD rotator or a DOTH rotator to place at the top of your page — or anywhere on any of your sites
that is clickable to bring the viewer to your homebase sales page with a contact info form and instructions on next step … etc…
I’m doing some of the above…
I’m doing some banners for the rotator for the headers of
DomainBELL.com and DropGrabs.com/WhatsNew/