What I've learned about selling domain names

I have a 5 letter (not a word) .com domain I don’t use with minimal back links, so I decided to try selling it.

1. False hope?

• GoDaddy thinks it is worth $1380 USD
• EstiBot thinks it is worth less than $100 USD (and has Registrar info that’s outdated by almost a year)
• URLAppraisal.net thinks it is worth $60 USD
• mysitewealth.com thinks it is worth $656 USD
• StatsChest thinks it is worth $569 USD

Maybe there is business in making a random # generator for domain appraisals that puts out such ridiculous values that people blog about it and send more traffic to the ridiculous tool.

2. Let’s try Sedo

This was easy to set up. Some surprises were

• posting the domain for sale is free. Promoting the domain within Sedo costs $
• the minimum price to sell a domain is ~$90 to cover Sedo’s commission. If you were thinking of selling for less, go somewhere else
• the default domain parking page provided by Sedo pushes users to download Flash player from someone that was not Adobe. That is super sketchy. I contacted Sedo’s support, and they gave me a better parking page. People have been complaining about this for a while

No one was interested in my domain. I don’t know much about marketing these things. While I waited for someone to notice it amongst thousands of other 5 letter (or shorter) domains for sale, I look at Flippa

3. Let’s look at Flippa

Flippa helps people sell businesses as well as domain names.

• Flippa charges $25 to post your domain, and takes a 10% success fee if it sells

I stopped to browse the list of domains for sale to see if mine had a chance of selling for more than $25. It seemed unlikely, so I stopped there.

4. What’s next?

• learn more from forums like namepros or /domains subreddit
• decide whether to just let the domain name expire or not, or renew and continue trying to sell it

Will this be worth my time? Who knows