How Do You Sell Domain Names For Pennies and Make Money?
Anyone that has searched for domain names on Ebay.com will see that there are thousands of items starting for below $1.00. So how do these sellers make money? Quick answer, many don’t, but there is a way to make money, a lot of money, but you need a good plan, dedication, and a domain name reselling website.
as for the quick answer, just because you see a seller with hundreds of items doesn’t mean they are making money. Just because you see a google adsense banner for a “get rich quick product” doesn’t mean it sells. We always market ourselves to our competition. Whenever we see a competitor doing something we think it works.
Affiliate marketing and e-commerce is all about deciding on a plan of action, testing it on the market and refining the process to make the most money. Many times the refining will take years, or never ends, as the markets change all the time.
Back to selling domain names on Ebay. There are 3 paths you can go.
- Buy all the low priced domain names and then resell, hopefully for a little higher. Ebay offers a developer API that allows you to find all the domain names that are below a certain amount, then the API will allow you to place a bid. So, you basically can bid on every domain name that is listed for a penny. Set your max bid to .99 cents and you will surely get a lot of domains. I don’t recommend this becuase there are many factors that go into names, and the profits will be very low.
- buy low priced domain names and then put a simple website on them and sell them as established websites… Profits are higher, tbut here is more work. One thing to note, if you sell in the “domain names for sale” category, you can list for cheap, but if you list in the “Websites for sale” plan on having to list as a featured item because the first 5 pages, at least, are featured items. If you don’t list as a featured item, you website will not been seen.
- The best solution is to start a domain name reselling company, buy domains for below market and then push them to new account within your company. This allows you to upsell additional products like hosting and email, and once the name needs to be re-registered you can make profits years down the road.
How to implement plan 3
Godaddy.com offers a domain name reselling site thru wildwestdomains.com. I started my reselling site thru them. I run 2 sites, Opendls.net (domain name reseller -reseller) This site is like wildwest domains. My second site is Opendls.com which sells domain names to the public.
In this case, we would focus on opendls.com, or selling domains to the public. The current buy rate for a .com is $7.29 and a .info is $1.50 (special promotion).
You go to your domain reseller site and buy domains for yourself. You pay the retail price ($8.99 .com - $1.99 .info), but in the backend you get the commissions so you are really getting them for the buy rate. then you put them on Ebay.com for a penny. This is where it gets exciting… Some will sell for 6 cents, some will sell for over $20, you never know. Let’s say our average is about $5.00 per domain, which is normal, and yes, YOU ARE LOSING MONEY. This is where upselling and renewals come into play.
Up-selling
Your reselling site also sells hosting, email, SSL, etc… you will get additional business and almost every upsell product is re-occurring payments.
Renewals
According to godaddy.com, about 80% of all domain names get renewed. Of course the numbers will be much less for us, let’s assume 50%. to get my point accross I’m going to use large numbers. In one year you buy 10,000 .info domain names to keep the price down. The total expense is $15,000 for all the domain names. Info domain names sell for a lot less and we will assume that again, they sell for a loss on Ebay.
You sell all 10,000 for an average of .80 cents each. This totals $8,000 in revenue. You are in the hole $7,000. The next year rolls around and it’s time to renew the domain names. You set the price to renew at $9.99 per year (buy rate of $7.49 for .info) this is a profit of $2.50 per domain name. At a 50% renewal rate (5,000 domain names) you will make $12,500 in revenue. Not to mention you have hundreds of customers registered in your domain name site. A percentage of those will buy more domain names, hosting, etc…
As you can see, it is not as it seems on Ebay. This money making plans needs up-sell products and you will need to run this business for a long time.
If you want to start a reseller account, I can offer a huge discount over wildwestdomains.
Wildwestdomains.com basic: $100/year Pro: $200/year
Opendls.net basic: $70/year Pro: $170/year
These are the exact same plans with the same buy rates.
Hopefully this answers the questions about how to make money selling domain names on Ebay. Feel free to leave any questions or comments. Also, if you need any domain names or hosting, please use Opendls.com
 | US $5.00 (0 Bid) End Date: Wednesday Jan-07-2009 4:36:23 PST Bid now | Add to watch list |
 | US $119.49 (8 Bids) End Date: Wednesday Jan-07-2009 5:22:33 PST Bid now | Add to watch list |
