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[Tutorial] The New Uniregistry Market: What’s So Special? With John Smrekar and Darren Cornwell

Frank Schilling has been raving about it for months. Industry blogs have been discussing it for weeks.

Now’s your chance to see the Uniregistry Market for yourself and make your own decision.

Originally scheduled as an exclusive for DNAcademy PRO members, we’re sharing this tutorial given by the two people most responsible for building the new Uniregistry Market.

Learn how to setup landing pages (with or without advertising), how submitted inquiries become leads, how to use Uniregistry’s customer relationship management system (for free), and how you can take advantage of their exceptional brokerage team. We also ask how the data is treated, and whether you have to share information.

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This Show’s Sherpas

John Smrekar
John Smrekar
John Smrekar is vice president in charge of product at Uniregistry.

Prior to this role, Smrekar was general manager of InternetTraffic/DomainNameSales, and worked for a host of other industry companies including Sedo, Dotster and RevenueDirect.com.

Smrekar received a BS in computer science from Linfield College.

More shows with John Smrekar »

Darren Cornwell
Darren Cornwell
Darren Cornwell is director of products at Uniregistry.

As a designer and lover of simplicity, Cornwell is responsible for the overall look and feel of the Uniregistry systems.

Cornwell received a BA from Ravensbourne in Content Creation for Broadcast and New Media.

More shows with Darren Cornwell »

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Interview Raw (Non-Edited) Transcript

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Watch the full video at:
https://www.domainsherpa.com/uniregistry-market-tutorial/

On today’s show, I interview the two guys responsible for the new Uniregistry Market, and DNAcademy students help me ask the tough questions.

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Michael Cyger: Hey everyone, and welcome to the DNAcademy webinar entitled The Insider Tour of the New Uniregistry Market. I’m Michael Cyger, Publisher of DomainSherpa and DNAcademy, and this is going to be a live webinar that will be recorded for later viewing and transcription. So, if you are watching right now and you feel like you missed something or you did not see the clicks that happened, you can go back and re-watch it at a later point. You will have that opportunity.

A couple of quick logistical items for DNAcademy. Students who are live during this taping. The sidebar way over there that is chatting down the right-hand side of your screen. That is for actual chatting. If the presenter asks you a question such as how are you doing today, you can actually type in a quick answer there and let the presenter know what is going. So, let’s try it. Go type in what state or, if you are out of the United States, what country you are from today.

YSM, John. Is that Australia? What is that? YSM. Chris is in from New York. John from New York. We have got a whole New York connection here. Kentucky, John. Awesome. Florida.

All right, secondly, if we are going through the tutorial and you have a question that you would like the presenter to answer, then you can ask it in the area underneath the video. You will want to scroll down the main section of the window in your browser. That Q&A section allows other people to look at your questions and then you can up-vote them, and then, when we get to the Q&A at the end of this session, I will start at the very top and work my way down. So, be sure to take a look at other people’s questions as we are going along.

There is a poll that is currently up and running. I wanted to hear your experience with Uniregistry to date, so please go to the poll tab just underneath this video and answer that quick poll about Domain Name Sales and Uniregistry. And if you have no idea what Domain Name Sales is, then we are going to give you an update on that. I am going to quickly pop in to the polls. It looks like four people. So, the question is: do you have a DomainNameSales.com or Uniregistry.com account? One person said that they have a DomainNameSales.com account. Four people have Uniregistry. One person has both, and three people have not used it at all.

And we have got more people joining. All right, the poll is changing right now. More people are going up. All right, so it looks like about half the attendees have used Uniregistry in the past, which is great.

All right, I would like to welcome my two guests for this special webinar. On the far right of your screen is John Smrekar. John is the Vice President of Product at Uniregistry and directly to my right in the center of your screen is Darren Cornwell. Darren is the Director of Products at Uniregistry. Welcome, gentlemen.

John Smrekar: Hey, how are you doing, Michael?

Michael: Good. John, let’s start with you. How long have you been with Uniregistry and what is your role there?

John: I have been with Uniregistry since before it was Uniregistry. So, about 4.5 years ago, I got a call from Mr. Frank Schilling. I had done some business with him in the past back in the early mid-2000s. I was working at a registrar years past and he needs help with a domain parking company. I had done a lot of domain parking work in the past, and so yeah, I got a phone call back in 2011, saying he needs some help with this whole Internet Traffic thing that was blowing up. So, Internet Traffic was the first company that I worked for, for Frank, and moved down here to the Cayman Islands and settled in and then slowly but surely we created Domain Name Sales.

And then with all the plans and new gTLDs came Uniregistry and now we are seeing a lot of these things all come together. Actually now the Uniregistry market kind of completes the circle there by bringing in parking and domain sales into Uniregistry. So, yeah, I have covered the gamut with our company here.

Michael: Yeah, you have. Been there from the beginning.

John: Yeah.

Michael: So, is Darren getting upset when he looks at Internet Traffic code? Was that code that you actually wrote or you were responsible for?

John: It is not so beautiful. Yeah, I had my hand in the code, but I think as anybody would admit, there are some things about Domain Name Sales and Internet Traffic that are not too pretty. I think that is where Darren comes in and has really changed a lot of things for us, helping our user interface, and I think that is one of the things that everybody holds up as being very good with our products.

Michael: Yeah, it is phenomenal, so thanks, John. Darren, let’s go to you. How long have you been with Uniregistry and what is your role and how does it contrast to what John is doing?

Darren Cornwell: Well, I would say that we compliment each other actually. I have been here about a year and a half, on the Island. I was not a domainer. I did not even know anything about domains before I started here. It is one of those strange industries that just kind of drags you in. Once you are here, you are hooked forever. What I do is I look after or over our products. I am not just the marketing. I look after some of our mobile stuff, like our mobile apps. I look after the market. Me and John help each other out with that. Look after the registrar.

Michael: Now, what do you really do?

Darren: I take stuff that I do not think is pretty and I turn it into something, which I think is pretty. That is my overarching principle here. I like things to look good. If it looks good, people want to use it.

Michael: That is true.

Darren: That is my philosopy. It needs to look good in order for people to want to jump onboard.

Michael: Yeah, all right. So, today we are going to discuss the new market at Uniregistry. So, those unfamiliar with it that are watching this show, it is a new section on Uniregistry that will handle parking and sales of domain names, both of which were handled in the past by DomainNameSales.com and prior to that, InternetTraffic.com. So, eventually I believe, John, DomainNameSales.com will be sunset and it will all be within Uniregistry.com.

John: That is correct. I mean I think it is natural for that progression to occur. I mean ideally, as a platform, we do not want to be hanging around, having business with these customers on one platform and then these other customers over on the other platform, but we do want to make it easy for people to transition, so one of the things we set off to do very early on was make sure that when we bring up the Uniregistry market, that somebody could still log into DomainNameSales with that familiar interface and still interact with inquiries and not lose traction on anything that was ongoing previously because the last thing we want to do is prevent somebody from making a sale.

Michael: Yeah, all right. So, the attendees are probably thinking, John and Darren, I can go to other platforms and I can park my names there, and I can sell my names there, and I can get contacts through them. Why is the Uniregistry market significant?

John: I am going to take that. I cannot think of another registrar as big as they come that has married a domain sales marketplace with their registrar. And while some of the big players kind of have both of those pieces in their portfolio, I do not think they have gone all the way and I think that we have come pretty dang close to going all the way here to try to marry these two platforms together and really start to address the full lifecycle of a domain name in one place. We might not have every product that everybody associates with the entire domain life cycle let’s say with options and drop catchers and stuff, but we are selling domain names from a retail basis and we are selling domain names in the aftermarket, and we think there is a lot of value by having the registrar and the sales marketplace right next door to each other and interact with each other directly. There are a lot of benefits to that, that are currently now in place and there are more benefits that we will implement in the future for that.

Michael: Yeah, and John is in the comments right now, chatting about the question that I asked you just now, John, and he is right. You guys have integrated all together, and I think a lot of other registrars have done something similar. GoDaddy has purchased Afternic in the past and they integrated those and it is in the cart path when people are checking out that they can buy other domain names, but often times, when you integrate major platforms that have been developed for years separately, you get sort of that Frankenstein effect that things do not necessarily flow well together. They may not look well together when people are on mobile, tablets, or on their mobile phones.

And John pointed out. Have you tried some of the other platforms out there? They look horrific and sometimes they act horrifically. And what you guys have done is pretty phenomenal that it works both in the app as a mobile app and online, and so we are definitely going to take a look at that. My other question, before we get into the tutorial and you guys share your screen, is that this is industry is full of complexity. I am doing some research right now for domain names that have been stolen and taken overseas and trying to get them back, and I am working with an attorney and we are putting together this framework for the discussion, so we can help people understand how to protect their domain names.

And the complexity of this industry is unbelievable. How do you take that complexity, which you are required to process from ICANN as a registrar, and then actually boil it into a process and then put a front end on it that makes it look so simple? Do you guys have a secret sauce for doing that? Some insights on how you do it.

Darren: No, we do not have a secret sauce, a secret recipe perhaps. Less is more. I mean registering a domain name is wonderfully complicated, and then, when you throw in stuff like country code level domains that have all these extra requirements or adult names, it is not like adding a t-shirt to your Amazon shopping cart. We have all these requirements we have to fill. I think the way that we do it and make it easy is that we just do not hide it from people. We do not hide it in the links. We do not stick it in a corner. We do not hide it under tool tips. It is all there. It is all right where you need it to be, and we are very upfront and honest about the information that we require.

Having little bars that guide you along, so you know where you are in the process. Very clever use of language. We try to stay away from traditional language. We do not use big words like registrar anywhere because before I started here, I did not even know what a registrar was and most people do not. It is an industry term. So, where we can, we try and stay away from stuff that could be considered confusing, and we just rewrite it as we go. In our experience, building less is much more difficult than building more. It pays for itself in leaps and bounds. I mean it is a win-win for everyone.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. All right, well, that answers my question, but I still do not know how to develop my stuff, so it is simpler to you. All right. So, at this point, we are going to turn over the screen to Darren. You are going to do a share screen and we are going to walk through that section of Uniregistry, so people know where to go. After they sign up for an account, where to get access to it.

Darren: Okay, can I just click this button here?

Michael: Yeah, click that button.

Darren: Maybe you can see me.

Michael: Yeah, and then I am going to maximize that screen. There we go.

Darren: Can I just dive in here?

Michael: Yeah, please do.

Darren: All right, so we just wanted to give you a very brief overview of how the market works once you have actually created an account. So, for those of you that do not have a Uniregistry account, I would encourage you to go and create one, and then you can click on the market tab in the top right-hand corner here and just click activate. And it will activate the market account and you will be ready to rock and roll. It is very, very simple. It is a very simple process to setup.

So, Michael was touching earlier on about why selling domains is complicated. You have to deal with the registrar. Maybe you have to deal with an aftermarket. Maybe you have to deal with name servers, with records. It becomes a very convoluted ball of string. So, what we have tried to do is to get rid of all that complication and just have everything live here on a single platform, which does not pretend to be something that it is not.

So, if you look at my screen here, you can see that I have already added eight names into my Uniregistry account, so these are just names that are held at the registrar as usual. So, let’s see how we sell our name. So, we have got two down at the bottom here. We have got Sender.Click and CouncilPage.com, and I want to add these names to the market and I want to sell them and I want to get a good price. So, we are going to select them both. Very simple. We are going to right-click and then, at the bottom here, we have got a link: sell these two domains on the market.

That brings us into the market setup. It is very simple. That is what we want to sell. Okay, fantastic, let’s move on to the next step. There is a conflict verification because this domain name lives in another one of my accounts. It is just to make sure if you are adding a name, that you are not trying to sell something that does not belong to you.

Michael: Right, so if I try and add a name that belongs to Ali Zandi, it is going to stop me.

Darren: Exactly. We do not want people selling other people’s inventory.

Michael: Good luck, Ali, trying to steal my names, buddy.

Darren: So, I sent the verification email off. We will not cover that today, but let’s just run through this. So, we have integrated EstiBot here for people that are new to selling domains. It is very often difficult to figure out how much a name is worth. It is an art. It is not just a science. So, yeah, we have added this option to let you price your names with EstiBot. I am not sure it is going to return a result for these. Oh, there you go. So, it thinks that Sender.Click is worth 570. CouncilPage is worth 260.

Michael: Nice integration.

Darren: I need to buy a new car, man, so I am going to sell these for 4950 a piece because that is me, and then there are a few (Unclear 14:49.0) screens, which basically just run through the process and explain to you that by listing the names on the market, if your names are pointed somewhere else, like maybe you have a website hosted somewhere or you have some emails setup, we are just saying that in order to display our parking pages, obviously we are going to override those (Unclear 15:04.9). We do not want people selling a name and then oh my goodness, my website left me. So, there you are. Great.

They are already there. If we click into the market here, we can check out our market domains. Okay, fantastic, so here are my six names that I added earlier. The other two that I just added are just pending. They will just take a couple of seconds to come in. So, let’s look at a real name.

So, this is one of my names that I have been playing with today. It is (Unclear 15:29.8).com. You can go to it in your browser right now if you want and this is all working live in real time. So, I just wanted to edit the name and figure out how I am going to sell this to someone. So, we are going to run down through. We can set our prices. Minimum offer. We can keep track of the historical data, so we know who we bought it from, where we bought it, and how much did it cost us. That is really handy later on in the process. When you are trying to sell the name, you often want to know how much you paid for it originally in order to figure out what your return is going to be.

So, in this instance, we have added the name and I want to sell it, so it is already set to inquiry form here. What does that mean? That means if you go to (Unclear 16:07.8).com, we will be showing an inquiry form, which is basically collecting sales data. We are asking users for their name, email, and telephone number. But we do not want to do that. What we want to do is we want to do pay-per-click ads and a sales banner, so I am going to switch this to pay-per-click, and you see that it is automatically updated over here.

Michael: That is nice.

Darren: If I turn the sales banner off, you can see we are just using a very simple graphical representation for how this works. So, obviously I want that on. I do not just want revenue from my ads. I want them to find my name, so I can click save and save that into the system, but I do not need to because I have already done it. So, you can see that in the space of literally 60 seconds, I added a name to the market, I estimated its price, I decided I did not like the estimate and put my own estimate in, and listed it for sale, and I setup pay-per-click parking, and I did it all in the span of less than the time it takes to make a cup of tea.

Let’s see how that looks. So, if I am going to have another browser running here, here is (Unclear 17:06.2).com. It is running. This is the default lander as many of you will be aware. This one has just been set to generic for the purposes of this demonstration. So, obviously clicking on these ads generates the revenue. There is nothing I can do about that, or we can submit an inquiry through to (Unclear 17:22.4). So, imagine you have just listed your name and 60 seconds later you get an inquiry. How does that work?

Again, in line with our mantra of less is more, I open up my other browser here. So, you can see on the left-hand side here, we have the inbox running, so we have two views. Selling and buying. Today we would like to talk about being a seller. So, John sent me an inquiry earlier actually, so if I open my inbox up, you will see that magically there it is. I have an inquiry. Somebody has offered me three thousand dollars. That is Josh, and there you go. I have an offer. Fantastic. So, I can open this up. Obviously here we are dealing with a single inquiry, but imagine the power of this system when you are dealing with one hundred inquiries or two hundred inquiries.

Suddenly this becomes a beautiful to-do list. You can just work your way down the list. Reply. Respond. Reply. Respond. Check out. Accept. Counter. It is a system that is solely designed around getting the sale completed. So, I am going to see what this is. I am interested in buying. Would you consider selling it for a grand? No, I do not think so. I think I would rather sell it for maybe four. Okay, so I can say you know what. I would like four thousand dollars for this, please, and then it is already pre-filled with his name and a link in order for him to get back in touch with me if he wants to accept it. Thanks for the kind offer. I would much rather have four thousand.

I can send that, and now magically it leaves our inbox, but then it is done. We have already actioned it.

Michael: Okay, and so you typed in four thousand, Darren, but then you also put four thousand into that little box. So, I guess that little box that you put four thousand in gives them an opportunity to say yes, I will check out on Uniregistry and pay that price.

Darren: You are correct. All prices are entered into the system in this instance are binding. So, in this case, I have quoted four and that means that if Josh agreed to my offer, he would be able to check out instantaneously.

Michael: Nice.

Darren: And one of the beautiful things about that is these names that we are talking about here – can I stop sharing my screen?

Michael: Yeah, please.

Darren: Sorry. There you go. One of the wonderful things about that is those six to eight names that I just added will live at Uniregistry. And having their names on our platform, it gives us an unprecedented level of control over them.

Michael: In what way?

Darren: Obviously they are on our systems. What does that mean? That means that if you add your own name at Uniregistry and go to Uniregistry.com and do a search, it is going to show up in the search results, just like a normal registration with your price. If you only want an offer, then we are going to show it as an inquiry only name, so people can talk to you. Here is where the real cool stuff happens. If you sell a name on Uniregistry and it is already here, what we do is we do instant completion. So, as it happens, as the transaction is going through, you will come back to your account five minutes later and we will be telling you hey, you know what. This name has left your account. We have given it to the person that purchased it. Here are your names from the person who purchased it. That is it. It is done.

It is a beautiful system. It steps you through the process. No more phone calls and emails and dealing with complicated systems over periods of weeks or months. We are firm believers in everything should be simple and quick, but most importantly, instant if possible.

Michael: So, basically you just built the checkout via the cart path that somebody that happens to select a domain name that is already owned by somebody else. If it is offered for sale, it is presented to them and they can checkout.

Darren: Yeah, if you have a marketplace name, we treat it as any other name inside the registrar.

Michael: Nice.

Darren: Yeah, it is pretty wonderful actually.

Michael: So, it is very similar to the GoDaddy Afternic that we just talked about, but on your own system.

John: Absolutely. Yeah, if you find a home for your domain names at Uniregistry, this is all available to you to transact with people and have the transactions happen instantly. That is really going to become a real big, strong point of our system. I do believe in the future we will see that aspect expanded to perhaps go beyond just what we can do with our own names here at Uniregistry.

Michael: Yeah. So, can I use the Uniregistry system if my domains are at another registrar?

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John: Absolutely. So, this covers external domain names just like the way Domain Name Sales has worked. You can list your entire portfolio. If it is an external domain name, the buyer is going to be coming through and using Uniregistry payment services, so actually that is one of the big benefits we just glossed over there, which is that you, as the domain owner, will be able to utilize our payment services. Credit card. PayPal. Wire transfer. All that stuff. We will clear the payment for you and pay you out, and basically our system has a very nice back and forth.

It is really complicated on the backend, but really simple for the user that steps you through the process of transferring the domain name between the seller and the buyer, and it will become very easy too because the buyer is buying the domain name at Uniregistry and there is actually a big benefit there if you are transferring your domain name to Uniregistry every time you clear a buyer not to have to push the domain to this registrar or that registrar and all different kinds of transfer rules. You can use our very easy transfer system. It will be as much as simply unlocking the domain name, dropping it off, code into the interface on our system, and everything else happens for you.

Michael: Oh, wow. All right.

John: That is kind of one of those things that is the real big piece that never existed in Domain Name Sales that now was built for this.

Michael: Yeah, and a lot of people have complained about Escrow.com over the past years, where you would transact the domain and the buyer would transfer money to Escrow.com, but then you have this piece where the seller has to get the buyer the authorization code and has to explain to them how to use it. And they did not quite accept it or maybe they did not see the email, and you have got to deal with all that stuff. You are removing all that complexity, so the seller does not actually have to deal with the buyer at all. You are right there in the middle.

John: Yeah, I mean we are acting as sort of a helping hand really. The buyer is going to fund their Uniregistry account to make this purchase, and we will facilitate the transfer of ownership between the two people whether the domain is at Uniregistry, which makes it a hell of a lot simpler, or whether it is an external domain name coming in to us and transferring, and then we will sort of I guess help the seller make an easy transfer in so that the buyer can get the domain name as soon as it hits Uniregistry.

Michael: Yeah, that makes sense. So, we talked about adding domain names, so people can either buy domain names directly through Uniregistry or they can add the domain names to the Uniregistry system, but still maintain them on their own registrar. Either way works, but then both ways you can park the domains through Uniregistry, you can mark them for sale and have a for-sale lander, and then you can get all the leads through the Uniregistry inbox.

John: Correct. Yeah.

Michael: All right. Is there anything else that is new with the market that we did not touch on?

John: One thing I would like to point out because I think there are probably some people who (A) might not have a Domain Name Sales account or they do, so let me just touch on real quick about getting an account. Previously we had people signing up for Domain Name Sales or applying for Domain Name Sales I should say.

Michael: Right.

John: And a lot of people were not accepted. The rules have been relaxed over time, but there was always some kind of rule in place for us to evaluate the people applying and we try to make it so that our brokerage team is working with valuable accounts because it kind of gave everybody unchecked access to our brokerage team and our parking advertising fees, which are coveted and we need to protect those relationships. But now you can come to Uniregistry and create an account as a completely new user and you can start selling immediately. There is nothing standing in your way from listing your domains for sale and using our sales only landing page.

Parking, because we still have to maintain quality standards with our advertising relationships, there is what is now a premium services section. Basically if you go into the market section, it is in the market options in the dropdown, and all you do is a quick, little request for activation. It will send a request off to us, we will take a look and make sure that everything looks normal, and then we will open up parking and then you will also be able to assign all of the domain names to our brokerage team to automatically have them handle your leads. So, there is still that component to it.

And then the last thing, which is if you are an existing Domain Name Sales customer and you come into the market, try to sign up with Uniregistry using your Domain Name Sales email address first because that would be the easiest way. We will recognize that and we will ask you: do you want to link your market account to your Domain Name Sales account? If you do, all you have to do is basically type in your Domain Names Sales username and password, and when you go into the list of domain names, all of your Domain Name Sales domains will be there. All of your existing inquiries will be there. Everything will be sort of as it is on Domain Name Sales kind of waiting for you without having to do any work at all. So, if you have a Domain Name Sales account, make sure you link them together.

Michael: Yeah. I know, as a developer, I like to make sure that people are using the same email address, but I actually had two separate email addresses. One for logging into my registrar account, which is not a public account, so I use it to log into my registrars for protection. And then I did type in a separate email address to bring over all of my Domain Name Sales information. Worked without a hitch. Nice job, guys.

John: Thanks.

Michael: And so, back on the premium services. So, basically if somebody is not a Domain Name Sales current customer and they sign up for Uniregistry and they add their domain names and list them for sale, they cannot park them until they have their domains reviewed by you.

John: They cannot park them on our pay-per-click landing page. The sales only landing page to collect leads definitely. That is the default, so as soon as the domains are added, they will be able to show that.

Michael: Okay, so you still have sort of a minimum standard for domains to be able to display parking advertising and to have the Uniregistry representatives potentially handle leads that come in on your domains.

John: Exactly. Yeah, basically on an automated basis. An automatic assignment. Now, you do not have to even have premium services and you can still take a lead who has come in and you have looked at it. You can still actually pass that on to a broker, so there is still access to our brokerage team for I guess, for lack of a better term, a warm lead.

Michael: Got it. Okay, great. Yeah, and Domain Name Sales helped me sell a domain name last year. CementTrek.com. You guys brought it up. I bought that domain for my middle son because I thought I was going to be dad of the year by giving him [email protected]. He poo-pooed the whole thing, so I was like forget it. I am going to sell it next chance I have, and we had a nice vacation as a result of that, but Domain Name Sales was great in helping to sell that domain name.

All right, so we went through I think all of the different options that we were going to go through. It looks like there is a few questions coming down there. I have one question regarding the use of data, guys. I know that people are going to enter in potentially a lot of information about their domain names. How much they paid. How long they have had it. You are going to have the information around inquiries. A bunch of information. How do you guys treat that information?

John: It is handled. We handle it pretty well. Right now the default for a domain name that is set to we are allowed to sort of publish like let’s say the sale price of a domain name. Potentially quotes. Now, that can be turned on very easily for all your domain names. There is a share market data setting and all you have to do is set that to disabled. And if you sell that domain name, it stays completely private.

Michael: Okay, so by default it is on. I think people should share domain name information because it gets the word out that domain names actually sell and that domains sell every day, every hour, and we should be getting that information out. Yours is set by default to on, but people can turn it off if they do not want to share it.

John: Exactly, and I think that is kind of the way that people have treated it for the most part for themselves. I mean a lot of times you are protecting the buyer having purchased some kind of sensitive domain name because maybe it is a branding initiative that they have not announced to public or whatnot and then they request hey, would you keep this sale private, and then you can turn that off. But in general, I think as an industry, we are better off if we get domain sales published and if they show up on DN Journal. It is a good thing for everybody.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. So, clearly you guys are providing a phenomenal, beautiful service to people. Nothing in life is free. What do you say to people who say how are you offering this for free?

John: Well, we hope to provide a lot of value. Now that it is married to the registrar, the registrar will benefit from having domains registered there. And we still give competitive pricing there. We do want to see more buy it now transactions. We want to see more transactions happening. We think we will just get more velocity going through our system. That is a huge benefit to us. We have priced the payment. There is a fee associated with using our payment services, which is to be expected, but it is competitive. We are beating our competitors at providing that service, so there is a little bit there.

And it is also a give and take. We want you valuable domain names to be accepted by our brokerage team to be handled and it is a commission-based system. We are going to try to work on fetching much higher price. I think we have proven that in the industry. We fetch higher prices on average than any other brokerage does, and that is what we are trying to do and that is where that commission comes in and it is worth every penny in my opinion.

Michael: Got it. So, people could view it as sort of a loss leader. You are giving domain name investors the access to this great tool and hopefully they are going to register domain names there. Hopefully they are going to use your service to sell the domain names and you guys are going to make a commission from helping them sell the domain name. They might buy additional services that you make commissions on, like Gmail service or what have you, and so you are trying to create a deep relationship with investors.

John: Absolutely. We are just starting to make that take shape.

Michael: Okay, sounds good. First question below. It was asked by Ali Zandi. Why should I move all of my domains out of Afternic pipeline and into the Uniregistry marketplace? Aside from Uniregistry being a much better-looking, more full-featured and functioning platform, how do I benefit on the sell side? How many resellers are there in your new marketplace or is your new marketplace tapping into?

Darren: Yeah, so I think this sort of is the reach of how the listings are happening.

Michael: GoDaddy has like a billion people going to them every year and Uniregistry is the startup that has a beautiful interface. Are people getting a better interface, but they just do not have as much flow through the system at Uniregistry?

John: Yeah, I would be lying if I said that we had as much audience as GoDaddy does. That is an area we are next to sort of penetrate this market. We have got the great product now, but we will be focusing on adding some unique methods for us to syndicate domain names. We have done some legwork being that we have a registry where we have the EPP protocol there at our disposal to make some things happen that maybe some other platforms do not quite have the capabilities of. So, we have kicked off some things on this EPP market product and I think we will see that make its way and become much bigger for us.

Michael: All right.

John: To help this syndication.

Michael: You are looking to use your technology base to get into the process, into the cart process at other registrars. Is that a fair way to say it?

John: We have a lot of registrar relationships and that is going to turn around and benefit everybody who is on our platform. It might not be today, but I think everybody can kind of imagine how that might work.

Michael: Yeah, all right. Next question is from Candice. I hope I am not asking too quickly here. Are there different landing pages, and if so, how do I change the look of the landing page?

Darren: So, yeah, this has been a subject of some debate around here recently. So, let me just say before I answer that that the page we currently have, the page that we gave everybody as an early gift with the Everest in the background. Actually in our testing, before we launched this, it converted way better than what we were using before. There was real rhyme and reason behind why we went with that parking page. I would like to think we are pretty good at figuring out what is good or bad with our testing.

Anyway. Beside the point, we have been talking about doing a parking page editor for as long as I can remember, and we always stop short of doing it because I am always a little worried about just letting people build anything willy-nilly. If you are using a service, then it is fair to assume that the service you are using I would hope would know what they are doing. In this case, the short answer is yes, there will be different landing pages. How do you change them? As of this precise second in time, you cannot, but it is something that we are actively working on here and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that you can expect to see something very, very soon. I would not like to comment on a date, but it is something that is really, really close for us.

It is just like everything we have built. We do not want to make a huge, complicated, hulking editor, where you can just do everything because that is just going to lead to complexity.

Michael: Yeah. Oh, Darren just froze up for a second. John, are you still there? Hey, can you guys still hear me? Type in the chat. All right, Ali still sees me. Oh, there we go. The video just caught up. Darren, are you still there?

Darren: Yes, I am.

Michael: All right, your feed from the Cayman just had to grab a beer or something, but it has caught up now. All right, so I think we got the gist of that question. The next question is from Kevin. The question is: how do you handle verification reaching the owner if the WhoIS is private, or if it is a CCTLD and you cannot even look up the information in the WhoIS?

John: We are talking about basically adding domain names that might have an ownership conflict.

Michael: Yeah, either adding domain names that could have, right, because that leads to the marketplace and selling them and everything else. Yeah.

John: So, this is a spot that much like the parking landing page project is imminent. We kind of have been handling that manually a lot in the past, which actually helps us because we can actually do some things manually that you cannot kind of do with a robot, but we are going to be doing some automated verifications. Grouped up emails. We drop in a big list of them. 200 names. Even if they have the same WhoIS privacy, we will be able to drop an email. Simple. One click. It will add the domain to your account. That is an imminent feature to get away from sort of the delayed conflict resolution.

The concept of delayed conflict resolution when you are adding new domains to your account is somebody else had owned them before. I think that is a sore spot on a lot of platforms, but I think we have got a solution in the works that is going to really kind of make that go away for our users.

Michael: Okay. All right, in the works. Next question is from Mary. Mary states that she has most of her domains at GoDaddy because the buyers know GoDaddy and it is an easy push to get the domain to the buyer. Is there any downside to keeping the domains at GoDaddy, but using landing pages at Uniregistry and then changing the name servers at GoDaddy to point to Uniregistry?

John: I do not see any problems there. I think if somebody has a domain product somewhere else, I had pointed out that they have a nice relationship with their GoDaddy account manager and that is great. You have your domains at the home that treats them the best, which was us, but sometimes it is not. But that situation is not uncommon and we fully support that. You can transact with a person directly. You can handle that transfer (Unclear 40:22.6) off of our platform if you would like. We are not going to mandate that you do, so there is a way for you to do that. If you set the landing page, use our landing pages. Feel the inquiry. Use our entire platform. The inbox handling the lead negotiation. And then, when you are ready to transact, it is possible to do it directly with GoDaddy.

Michael: Okay. But can they transact it through Uniregistry if they want?

John: Yes, absolutely.

Michael: And then just push it. So, the buyer will pay Uniregistry. Uniregistry will hold the money until the buyer says that they received the domain name, which would be then pushed over at GoDaddy, and then you would disperse the funds to the seller at that point.

John: We will not be able to transact that with the actual funds. That puts us in a very precarious situation, where we cannot verify a transfer of ownership. This is kind of the weak point in the industry as far as even I guess the pure escrow services are not really pure escrow services in the sense of like real estate or something. There are things that can go wrong in a pure domain escrow situation. So, I think if we were going to collect funds through our credit card merchant, that puts us at a certain risk, and so I think what is going to happen is, is you can use your own payment services or third party payment service. In this case, you are free to use Escrow.com to handle the completion of that deal, but you can go all the way through the negotiation process with us.

Michael: So, basically you are giving away a free CRM system for people to manage their inquiries and come in. And when people want to make the switch or want to start buying some domain names, new domain names, or they are buying domain names from others that are already at Uniregistry, they can keep them there and then test out your system and they will learn over time hopefully is what you guys are planning that your system works a lot better, has less hurdles to get over, and should hopefully make them more money.

John: Yeah, I think that person would find that the experience actually would be easier just to complete the deal on our platform and allow that person to take ownership at Uniregistry. It actually will be a lot easier for both buyer and seller.

Michael: All right. Question from Chris. With parked pages, so pages that are showing advertising, what is the typical conversion rate of a page visitor to a paid click and what does traffic typically monetize at?

John: I have been involved in domain parking since probably late 2003, so I have been doing it for over a decade. That has changed over time so much, and I was explaining to one of our customers just yesterday or the day before. Similar question, and I think I said something to the effect of each domain is different. Each click is different. Each visitor that clicks is different. And the way that the ad networks handle their analytics are different. They use different signals for those users. And each click is a snowflake I think was the great analogy in terms of its pricing. So, while a portfolio on an aggregate, some portfolios I have seen revenue for a thousand visitors as high as three hundred dollars per thousand visitors, which is very, very high for (Unclear 44:18.1) domain names. Other portfolios do extremely well at ten dollars per thousand visitors or even five dollars per thousand visitors, and that is the RPM metric.

It runs the gamut, and a lot of times it depends on how well one domain name does in that portfolio, and so what I would encourage people to do is look at the domain level when they are analyzing their domain names to really get a sense for how well they (Unclear 44:47.6) perform. System-wide, I mean kind of take the numbers I have given. Lows in the single digits, mediums between like ten and 50, and then if you are above 50 RPM and you run your parking, you have got some pretty strong clickthrough rates and pretty strong, high CPC keyword hitter associated with your domain names.

Michael: Yeah, and I think for newer investors, which are going through DNAcademy, it is tough to buy domain names that have that residual type in traffic unless they used to be a developed website that you picked up on the drop and then you are able to monetize them through parking. I have three domain names out of my small investment portfolio that do use Uniregistry parking pages and they used to be websites that I ran that I have since closed down. One of them makes five dollars per month, one of them makes ten dollars per month, and one of them makes 20 dollars per month, which are great for individual domain names. Those are the ones that you want to keep.

If I could scale that out in mass, yeah, I would be sitting pretty, but they are tough to get a hold of and they do not get a ton of traffic, so the revenue per thousand RPM is high and I wish I had thousands of visitors per day.

All right, couple more questions. Is there one page that outlines all the costs/fees of the various aspects of the marketplace, such as bank transfer payouts for non-US accounts?

John: We do not have that single page to kind of outline it all just. In various places where these things happen, we do have guidance, such as the completion fees. It is really shown to you when you re pricing a domain name. And that way, you know that if the buyer goes and checks out and buys that name that you know what net you are going to get after the fees and all that other good stuff, so you can make sure you gross up your price. And that has been the method in the industry, is you have got to factor in your commission. You have go to factor in your escrow fees or whatever it might be.

So, we have kind of placed that where they need to be. Seeing a schedule, yeah, it is a great suggestion. I think we will try to get a page up like that.

Michael: Cool. All right, thanks for that, John. Another question from John. Darren, when you were doing the tutorial, there was a hidden from DNS in the domain name view. Do you know what that was?

Darren: Yeah, we were talking a lot about keeping your data private. The small switch underneath that says share your data. It is exactly that. We would just like to share a tag on top, so depending on where you are inside the system, because you are not always going to be on the settings page, looking at a switch, so that is something that you want to see perpetually to know that that is the status of the domain.

Michael: Ah, okay. All right, there you go. Done answering that. Question from John. Adding a CCTLD to the marketplace. .UK names, for example, you will not see email addresses on the WhoIS record. What about DNS record verification? So, this is exactly the same as the question that Kevin asked and you guys said that you verify DNS sometimes manually on those where you need to for the CCTLDs.

John: That is correct. Yeah, we do it manually. We can usually resolve those. If we need to reach out to the owner for something, we will. If anybody has any trouble with like a .UK name, we actually do not really have a lot of them on our platforms. They probably have not come up that often, but if you do have a problem getting any of those in from an ownership conflict standpoint, yeah, our support team can take a look. And the great thing, which may change a little bit as we grow, but we know a lot of our customers personally. In some cases, (Unclear 48:52.4) has really helped us. So, yeah, if you have a problem, just reach out to our customer support team.

Michael: Sounds good. All right, last question, gentlemen, is from Candice. Do I have to enter a list price for my domain? When I change my sales method to offers only and I remove that list price, I get an error message saying that I cannot update.

John: Okay, we can take a look at that problem, but no, you do not have to have a list price for any domain name. Even if you set it to buy it now, I believe we default it back to offer only if the domain is set for sale.

Michael: Okay, so that is probably just one of the settings and I can connect you with Candice after this to make sure that that gets resolved. All right, we are out of time for this webinar. I would like to thank John Smrekar and Darren Cornwell for being our experts today and walking us through the new Uniregistry market for parking and selling domain names. If you have not signed up for a free Uniregistry account, you should. Go sign up. Just take a couple of your domain names, put it into the market, check it out, and I guarantee you will be dazzled by the beauty and simplicity of their system. Thank you two for joining us today. Really appreciate your time.

John: It was great doing this. Really appreciate the invite, Michael.

Darren: Thank you. Yeah, it is good fun.

Michael: My pleasure. Thank you very much for attending everyone. We will see you soon.

Watch the full video at:
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23 Responses to “[Tutorial] The New Uniregistry Market: What’s So Special? With John Smrekar and Darren Cornwell”

  1. Mike says:

    Where is the video? Thanks.

  2. Tejinder singh sidhu says:

    When will these nearing 200 domain names in Uniregistry market be selected for parking, my request ticket is pending. Do I need to do something more to enable parking of domains to help in sale and revenue earning?

    1. Hi Tejinder,

      I suggest you contact Uniregistry support directly with your question.

      Sign into your Uniregistry account, then visit their support page at https://uniregistry.com/account/admin/support and click the NEW TICKET green button.

      Best,
      Michael

  3. Till date, the Uniregistry website is not even responsive. That is one area they’ve failed to deliver.

    1. Have you tried their mobile app? They have one for both iOS and Android.

  4. Fuming says:

    Won a domain a week ago on Namejet.
    Shows Uniregistry as handling it at registrant level.
    A week later and even after opening a ticket with Namejet I still dont have a domain that cost a pretty penny.
    I have kept checking the landing page and as recently as 3 days ago an offer landing page for domainnamesales showed up.
    This was a gift for my wife and I am crestfallen that I have no money and no domain

    1. Hi Fuming,

      I understand your frustration.

      If you won the domain name at NameJet, then you should contact NameJet support to ask for a status update on your domain name. You can call NameJet at (425) 974-4687 or submit a ticket at https://supportcenter.custhelp.com/app/ask.

      I do not believe that Uniregistry has any say in the matter until the domain name transaction is finalized at NameJet.

      Let me know how it goes.

      Best,
      Michael

      1. Fuming says:

        Thanks for your swift and helpful reply.

      2. Fuming says:

        NameJet Support got back to me

        “We have written to the Seller requesting he expedite the transfer of this domain if at all possible. He has generated it, but it’s not pending transfer from the other Registrar yet. (Uniregistry)

        We do apologize for the length of time this has taken. As you know, it’s a bit different than when it’s just an expiring domain from eNom for example.

        I assure you that we are in communication with the Seller, and will do all we can to get this taken care of as quickly as possible.

        So it appears Uniregistry needs to pick up the ball here and figure out what’s going on.

        1. Hi Fuming,

          That doesn’t make sense to me. Can you email me at michael at domainsherpa dot com and let me know the name of the domain name? I’ll email NameJet on your behalf and see if I can help you figure out the holdup.

          I know the team at NameJet and Uniregistry. I can’t imagine what would be the holdup from their perspectives.

          I can’t promise anything but that I’ll try to help, if you’re interested.

          Best,
          Michael

          1. Fuming says:

            Greatly appreciate your offer of help.

          2. Fuming says:

            Just wanted to update that everything is resolved and I credit Michael for his help.

  5. Ryan says:

    How do I add domains via the new Uniregisty marketplace, the process is quite different from adding to DNS, when I could specifically add a new domain to a certain portfolio in bulk, without having to price it first?

    1. John Smrekar says:

      Hi Ryan,

      The additional steps for pricing in the Market are optional. Just be sure to click through to the end of the process. Stay tuned for enhancements to this function to cover things such as adding directly to an existing portfolio.

      – John

  6. Saro says:

    I had started to use the Uniregistry Market and registering more & more at Uni. Great platform! I’ve went through a lot of the options and I have a couple of questions (don’t know if Darren or John will answer them here..)

    1- When choosing “Buy Now” pricing, does it matter what the landing page type is/was , ie, ppc, inquiry, affiliate plus? Or by choosing “Buy Now” it overrides everything and applies the Buy Now lander (obviously also having put the buy now price amount). Want to make sure for specific reasons.

    2- If I buy a name for example from a private seller who pushes the name from his account at “X” registrar to my account at that registrar & I put “Buy Now” on the Uniregistry Market and it’s sold, what happens?
    I ask because when the whois changes due to the account change, some registrars aka Godaddy blocks it from transferring out for 60 days. This question would also apply to the ICANN 60 day rule for new names.

    Thanks everyone,
    Saro

    1. John Smrekar says:

      Hi Saro,

      1) The Landing Page Type does not affect the Sales Method. The Landing Page setting dictates what we show first to people who go directly to your domain in their browser. The Sales Method will affect what type of page we display if the user is shown the Inquiry Form. This will be a page based on either BIN Only, Offer or BIN, or Offer Only.

      2) A Buy Now on a non-Uniregistry domain is predicated on the domain transferring to Uniregistry – that’s where the buyer is making the purchase. If there is some reason you’ve pre-arranged a sale, you can utilize a 3rd party payment service to do a 3rd party transfer of ownership.

  7. I’d like to answer two of the questions from the Q&A more fully:

    1. Why is this thing so Darn Special?

    A. Uniregistry Market is the only platform that shows you everything about your buyer.. His name, email, IP and let’s you self negotiate and self settle the transaction, or use Uniregistry brokers. It’s a very powerful bit of kit that empowers you in ways that Flippa, Afternic and Sedo don’t, can’t and won’t. Nobody offers this amount of transparency with a follow up system and CRM for managing leads into the future. Nobody.

    2. Why move names from another sales platform to Uniregistry when large registrars like Godaddy offer lead syndication across Godaddy?

    A. The dirty secret of the sales industry is that 90% of leads come to the name itself and click on the sales banner. When your names are NOT available on godaddy syndication or via another registrar, people will still find your name and buy them via type-in or whois. No real buyers buy a name without visiting the name. If I thought for a second that Godaddy helped me sell more names for more money, I would absolutely transfer all my names to Godaddy. The truth is they don’t. I’ve tested it thoroughly. Real buyers will type the name in the address bar (even if they see it listed on a “market site” like SEDO or in a registrar’s search) and then make the decision to buy from there. Own the name and you dam the traffic upstream. You might get less inquiries, but the most sincere buyers who consistently pay the most money, visit the name itself. It shows in our average sales prices.

    The Uniregistry market picks up long after you’ve forgotten about an inquiry.. Your names can live at any registrar and take advantage of the Uniregistry market.

    Join today. : )

    1. Adam says:

      Do you have to be accepted to the Uniregistry Market like you do with DNS? Or is the Uniregistry market open to anyone? This is not clear to me and others.

      1. Great question that’s answered in this show. You can watch, listen or read the transcript for the answer.

        (Yes, I previously answered your question in the wrong thread from my iPhone. Cleaned up and re-posted it here.)

  8. Ron says:

    Really interesting to hear about the new system from those responsible. Thanks for sharing this DN academy video!

    1. Our pleasure, Ron. Thanks for watching and taking a moment to post a comment.

  9. Candace says:

    Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions guys. Really appreciate that.

    Thanks Mike for setting up the tutorial.

    1. Thanks for attending live and asking some great questions!

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