Is SecuredOffers.com a brokerage service?
How long does it take for my offer to be submitted?
When can I expect to hear back from the domain owner?
What is the benefit of using SecuredOffers.com?
What is the cost of the SecuredOffers.com service?
If my first offer is too low do I have to pay again to submit a new offer?
How do I make payment?
Why can’t I contact the domain owner directly?
Why do I have to pay to submit an offer?
Are all the domains held by companies that use the SecuredOffers.com service available for sale at reasonable prices?
How do I know how much a domain name is worth?
Why are some domains so valuable?
How does a domain purchase transaction work?
How does the escrow process work?
Are there any future costs associated with domain ownership?
Is SecuredOffers.com a brokerage service?
No, SecuredOffers.com is not a brokerage service. It does not represent you in negotiations with the domain owner. The role of SecuredOffers.com is similar to that of a courier. It makes sure that your offer reaches the decision maker at the domain owner. It also guarantees that you will receive a prompt reply to your offer, within five business days.
How long does it take for my offer to be submitted?
Immediately upon the completion of your transaction at SecuredOffers.com, your offer will be submitted to the decision maker at the company that owns the domain name you are inquiring about.
When can I expect to hear back from the domain owner?
Domain owners who work with SecuredOffers.com commit to respond to your offer within five business days. Typically you will receive a response within a few hours.
Please do not submit an offer for a domain name through SecuredOffers.com unless the domain name or the domain owner indicates that this is the recommended way to submit an offer. If you mistakenly submit an offer for a domain name that is not participating in this service, you can request a refund of your payment.
What is the benefit of using SecuredOffers.com?
You are put in direct contact with the decision maker on the domain you are inquiring about. You will receive a prompt reply, with pricing information, including a contact email for the decision maker. Is that worth $19 to you?
Participating companies rely on the SecuredOffers.com service to qualify inquiries. Inquiries that are not sent through SecuredOffers.com are likely to be disregarded.
SecuredOffers.com solves a problem in the marketplace for both domain owners and domain buyers.
Large domain portfolio holders often receive dozens of inquiries a day. The vast majority are likely to be from people with just a passing interest in the domain or with no appreciation of the market value of the domain in which they are interested.
Responding to a domain inquiry requires researching the commercial potential of the domain, reviewing comparable sales, and analyzing a number of valuation factors. To evaluate a domain properly can take 30 minutes or more. If this level of effort isn’t made, the evaluation will likely be off-base, either too high or too low.
All too often, after a domain owner has made a serious effort to evaluate a domain and respond to a domain inquiry, the response is ‘No thanks, the most I can offer is $25’, or ‘This is one of dozens of domains I am interested in, I’ll get back to you’, or ‘Thanks but I just found a different domain’.
Domain owners therefore become frustrated when they perform this work and it too often goes nowhere. Some domain owners become so frustrated that they stop responding to domain inquiries. Frank Schilling, owner of one of the largest and most valuable domain portfolios, once revealed in his blog that he had an email folder containing over 11,000 unanswered domain inquiries.
The problem that domain buyers face is that their inquiries typically go unanswered. Many domain owners as a practice do not respond to domain inquiries, for the reasons listed above.
There are several obstacles a domain buyer faces in receiving a response. First, the inquiry must reach the right person in the organization that owns the domain of interest. Second, the decision maker needs to read, review, and take the inquiry seriously. Third, the decision maker needs to draft a response and then send the reply. Too often an inquiry does not reach the right person or the decision maker is not motivated enough to reply, or as a matter of practice does not reply to domain inquiries.
The domain owners who use the SecuredOffers.com service are committed to promptly reviewing and responding to all inquiries submitted through SecuredOffers.com. By using SecuredOffers.com as a Domain Buyer you have the confidence that your inquiry will be delivered directly to the decision maker and that you will receive a timely response.
With SecuredOffers.com, the domain owner knows that the inquirer is at least serious enough to commit a few dollars to the process and while that often doesn’t cover the time the domain owner puts into responding to an inquiry, it at least lets the domain owner know the person making the inquiry is more serious than the typical inquirer.
What is the cost of the SecuredOffers.com service?
The cost of the SecuredOffers.com service is $19. The SecuredOffers.com service ensures that your offer reaches the domain owner and that you receive a prompt response. For domains participating in the SecuredOffers.com service you will be contacted directly by the decision maker with pricing information on the domain. The $19 fee is a one-time fee, and will put you in direct contact with the decision maker. SecuredOffers.com is the exclusive means to submit inquiries and offers to domain owners who are participating in the SecuredOffers.com program.
If my first offer is too low do I have to pay again to submit a new offer?
No. The $19 fee is a one-time payment that puts you in direct touch with the decision maker at the domain owner. From that point on you will negotiate directly with the decision maker and SecuredOffers.com will no longer be involved. If your first offer is too low you can submit a higher offer directly to the decision maker and no further payment to SecuredOffers.com will be required.
How do I make payment?
Payment is handled by PayPal. To make payment you leave the SecuredOffers.com site and are redirected to PayPal. Your payment information is disclosed only to PayPal. SecuredOffers.com never sees your payment details. PayPal simply reports back to SecuredOffers.com whether or not the payment is made successfully.
You can make payment with any major credit card. You can also make payment from your existing PayPal account, if you have one.
Why can’t I contact the domain owner directly?
By using SecuredOffers.com you are reaching the domain owner directly. The domain owners who work with SecuredOffers.com have designated SecuredOffers.com as the exclusive means of submitting general inquiries and offers for their domain names.
Why do I have to pay to submit an offer?
SecuredOffers.com provides a valuable service by fixing a broken system for communicating between domain buyers and domain owners. Domain owners often ignore inquiries. For their part, domain buyers often feel that they are sending inquiries into a black hole as they rarely receive a response and don’t know who to contact that has decision making authority.
Holders of large domain portfolio receive a steady flow of inquiries. Many of the inquiries are anonymous or from aliases. Some are generated by automated scripts. A portion are from people who don’t understand the value of quality domain names and think it is reasonable to offer $20 for a domain that may have been acquired for thousands of dollars. A few are from those who will resort to legal threats if they don’t like the price offered. After years of responding to inquiries that lead nowhere, domain owners typically are burnt out and stop responding. They are looking for a better solution. SecuredOffers.com provides that solution.
SecuredOffers.com pre-qualifiers the inquiries sent to domain owners. We ensure that the offers come from real people, that the inquirer is serious enough to spend a few dollars to submit a qualified inquiry, and that the inquirer does not question the legitimacy of the domain owner’s domain name registration.
The value SecuredOffers.com providers to a domain buyer is that it ensures that your inquiry will receive consideration and a prompt response. Before SecuredOffers.com the odds were good that a domain inquiry would never reach the right person, or would never be read, or would be read and quickly tossed aside. With SecuredOffers.com your inquiry will go directly to the decision maker, will receive full consideration, and will be promptly responded to.
Your payment to SecuredOffers.com and your participation in the submission process qualifies your inquiry and entitles you to a consideration of your offer and a prompt response from the domain owner.
Are all the domains held by companies that use the SecuredOffers.com service available for sale at reasonable prices?
The short answer is, “No”. Not all of the domains are available for sale. And many of the asking prices may strike you as unreasonable.
The domain owners that use SecuredOffers.com to qualify inquiries on their domains typically own large portfolios of thousands or tens of thousands of domains. Not all of these domains are available for sale. Some may be reserved for future development, or may be licensed to third-parties. If you use SecuredOffers.com to inquire about a domain, the answer you may receive back is that the domain is not available for sale.
Large portfolio owners have typically invested millions of dollars in building their portfolios. They have years of experience with domain name valuations and are familiar with the sales prices from thousands of domain name transactions. This gives them a wealth of knowledge in valuing domain names.
Unlike mass-produced items, the nature of domain names is that each one is unique. A popular domain name will receive dozens of inquiries and offers. Yet a domain can only have one owner at a time. Pricing is set by the ‘best and highest use’. If a large consumer products company wants to use a particular domain for the nationwide roll-out of a new product, that domain will likely be worth more to this company than it would be to a corner store in a small town. So if the corner store inquires about the price of the domain, the response may be a number that would seem unreasonable to the corner store but would be viewed as a bargain by the consumer products company. The wider the commercial applications of a domain name, the more likely the valuation will be substantial.
How do I know how much a domain name is worth?
Every domain name is worth a different amount depending on the market it targets, the quality of the domain name, the commercial potential of the domain, and the owner’s willingness to sell. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the value of domain names by researching sales comparables. You can view reports of past domain name sales at DNJournal.com.
Also, note that most publicly available information on domain sales prices come from the results of liquidation auctions where domains are sold at fire-sale prices to other domain investors. Sales to end-users are rarely publicly disclosed and usually occur at much higher valuations.
The domain owners using the SecuredOffers.com service are more likely to be buyers rather than sellers at liquidation auctions and will typically only part with a domain if presented with an offer that recognizes the commercial potential of the domain name. It is unlikely that any domain available through this service would have a value below $5,000 and most will be valued in the five-figures and higher. In particular, most three-letter dot-com domains are valued well into the six-figures. A list of publicly reported sales of three-letter dot-com domains in the six-figure range is available through this link to a report from NameBio.com.
You significantly improve your chances of receiving a positive response from the domain name owner, and conducting successful negotiations, if you educate yourself on the value of domains and present a full value offer. We strongly recommend doing this research before presenting your offer so that you don’t pay the SecuredOffers.com fee to present an offer that is likely to be rejected.
Why are some domains so valuable?
A domain name becomes a business’ online brand, and sometimes its offline brand as well – think Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, or Furniture.com. Your domain name usually will appear on every marketing piece, every advertisement, every business card, and every email of your business for the life of your business.
It is the first step for customers finding you online. If a customer can’t remember your domain name, then they’re not likely to find your business online.
A strong generic brand is instantly memorable. Companies using fanciful domains such as Yahoo!, GoDaddy, or CareerBuilder have had to spend tens of millions of dollars promoting their brand and building brand awareness. But Cars.com, Jobs.com or Shoes.com have an instant, memorable brand as well as instant credibility, saving them millions of dollars in marketing costs.
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses in the world, large and small. But there is only a relatively small number of strong, brandable, dot-com domains. The importance of a powerful, memorable, domain name combined with a limited supply and high demand, creates significant value for the better domain names.
How does a domain purchase transaction work?
This depends on how the owner wishes to proceed. If the domain is inexpensive, often times you will be able to pay with PayPal, credit card, or wire transfer. For more expensive domain names, owners will likely require the use of a licensed escrow service, such as Escrow.com, SEDO.com, or Moniker.com.
Once payment is made, the transfer of the domain to your ownership and control can also be completed in many ways. The quickest is usually an account change at the same registrar, these types of transfers are usually free and instantaneous. A domain can also be transferred from one registrar to another, such as from Moniker to GoDaddy. These transfers can take up to a week to process, and usually include one year renewal fee at the gaining registrar.
How does the escrow process work?
The process is fairly similar across the various service providers. For example, at SEDO or Moniker, you would start by submitting payment to the escrow company. Once they have secured your funds, the domain owner would transfer the domain name to the escrow company. At that point, the escrow company will simultaneously release your funds to the seller, and transfer the domain name to you.
At Escrow.com, the company does not take possession of the domain name. Instead, after the escrow company secures your payment, the domain owner transfers the domain directly to you, the buyer. Once you verify that the domain name is under your control, you notify Escrow.com, and they will release the funds to the seller.
Escrow companies ensure that the transaction happens safely and securely. Domain owners usually have a preferred escrow provider that they will use to handle the sales of their domain names.
Are there any future costs associated with domain ownership?
The price you pay for a domain name is a one time fee. After that, your only financial responsibility is to pay the yearly renewal fees at your registrar. The renewal price for .com, .net, and .org domains varies depending on the registrar and the services offered but is usually between $8 to $35 per year.
