Hello and Assalamo Alaikum,

I wanted to clear up first that I am starting to like using Afternic because I made some nice sales at Afternic last year including last month as well. But that doesn’t mean I will stop sharing the issues I faced using Afternic with you guys which will help you to be careful in advance.

I already sold a domain last year through Afternic for $15,000 (Afternic commission 15%) and got the payment through wire option smoothly. Later at the end of last month, I made my first low amount of sale at Afternic last month which was of Adventix.com for $5,000 (Afternic commission 20%). I admit my mistake of not remembering the commission change which is on the higher side for lower amount of sales.

It is something like this:

20% commission ($15 minimum) for domains costing between $50 and $5,000.
For domains costing between $5,000 and $25,000 the cost will be $1,000 plus 15% of the amount over $5,000. So if you sold a domain for $20,000 you’d pay $1,000 plus 15%.
For domains costing over $25,000 you’ll pay $4,000 plus 10% of the amount over $25,000.

Afternic must point out somewhere in the dashboard or negotiation page about their cut for that particular deal. For my above domain sale, I was expecting their cut is the same 15% and I agreed to the price but later the broker informed me about that and he asked if there is the need of contacting buyer about the price change but I stopped him because I had my words (price to buyer) given and that would have been unfair and unethical for buyer to see the price change in no time! Finally I sticked to that price and eventually the domain was sold within a week.

So in short, commission structure is not clearly mentioned, although they have informed about that in past but that cannot be recalled while making sale specially after a long period of time reading the changes in commission.

The next problem came when the payment was received by Afternic, they asked me to select payment method and I was unable to find wire option which I selected for my last sale. I contacted the broker and even called their helpline but unfortunately they had their rules of not sending wire for any amounts under $10,000. That’s just ridiculous! I asked the reason and was told the bank don’t allow us to send small payments. Another ridiculous statement!

I was left with 2 options left. PayPal and check. As many of you are aware that PayPal don’t support Pakistan for opening an account. For check, it would have taken around 75 days to get funds cleared. Finally I received funds in one of my relatives PayPal account.

Last but may not be the least issue, you instantly receive email for price request (only when you haven’t priced your domains) and Afternic asks you to update through logging into your account but you don’t see the domain at dashboard for almost an hour to update pricing unless you are familiar using their platform and knows to find the domain under your portfolio and update pricing. So it’s better for Afternic to either send price request notification a bit with delay or simply update the dashboard immediately with the domain showing up because all sellers are not pro and can easily be confused.

Care to share your experience with Afternic and feel free to share if you had any similar good 😉 experience in past.