At Halcydon Identity, we’ve partnered with several domain brokers as well as having limited options to buy direct via escrow. Currently, our brokers are Afternic, Brandpa, BrandBucket, Sedo, and Uniregistry. Certain sites, such top level domains from other countries and certain special deals (like two-for-one specials) are only currently available via escrow services such as escrow.com, and escrow.epik.com
Why do we use brokers and escrow? The simple reason is to protect both you the buyer and us as the seller. Buy ensuring a third party safely holds the funds before the domain is transferred, both parties are assured that transaction can be completed safely. In order to do this, the broker or escrow services uses charges a fee. This fee can be a flat rate, but its typically a percentage of sale. This commission percentage varies from as low as 5% to as much as 30%, depending on the service. As a buyer, you do not pay that fee, we at Halcydon Identity pay that fee.
While some fees seem high, we feel it is a safe exchange to ensure that domain is safely delivered to your registrar. As well as safe transactions, the advantage of many brokerages is that they offer a huge market place where buyers can browse your domains.
Buying from one these brokers is easy, you just click the ‘buy now’ button and pay via credit card or paypal. Otherwise, you can make a counter offer for the domain.
Below is a list of the brokers we currently use, and what we like about them, and thoughts about their service. If you have any questions, please contact us!
Afternic.com
Afternic is one of the biggest market places for domains, with over 100 partners with over 75 million domain searches. They are owned by Godaddy.com. The commissions that Afternic earns from our sales is typically 15% plus an additional fee depending on the size of the sale.
An advantage of selling on Afternic is that we can redirect the domains here to Halcydon.com, where you can start your due diligence on the domain history.
Here is our listing of domains on Afternic: https://www.afternic.com/halcydon
BrandBucket.com
BrandBucket is an independent broker that specialises in brandable domains for businesses. BrandBucket is selective on the types of domains they list, and only accepts .com, .ly, and .io domains. In addition, the commission taken is amongst the highest amongst brokerages, taking as much as 30%.
Once accepting your domain, they suggest will design a logo and appraise your value. The domains have to be hosted on BrandBucket. Unfortunately their listings don’t through the same rigor of background checks (domain history, backlinks, keyword searches, etc), but you can look up the domain history on Halcydon.com
Here are all of Halcydon’s listing on BrandBucket.com: https://www.brandbucket.com/profile/halcydon/
Brandpa.com
Brandpa.com is very similar to BrandBucket.com, in that they work on brandable domains for businesses. You may submit your design ideas to the logo designers. One advantage that Brandpa has over BrandBucket is that the commission are slightly lower, and their a.i. system can give you an instant valuation of your domain (it can take weeks for a domain appraisal at BrandBucket).
In general the support has been good; in one case we found that a backlink profile of one of our domains had been tainted with spam, thus lowering the SEO value. When we presented this evidence, they allowed us to remove the domain free of charge.
You can view our domains at Brandpa here: https://brandpa.com/sellers/halcydon
Sedo.com
Sedo is another massive, international, market place for domains. According to the ICANN wiki, they sell over 32,000 domains per annum, making them one top domain brokers in the world. Sedo stands for Search Engine for Domain offers; their services include brokerage, auctions, parking, and appraisals.
Sedo’s commissions are competitive, they start as low as a flat 10 percent for parked domain, and 15% on domains old in their marketplace.
You can find all of our domains listed on Sedo via this link.
Uniregistry.com
Uniregistry offers the most competitive commissions starting 10% on parked page sales, 15% on their brokeraged sales, and no commission on self brokerage. They are owned by GoDaddy and have a large marketplace of over 8 million domains.
As with Afternic and Sedo, you don’t have to have your pages directed to UniRegistry, this means you can read the more detailed domain statistics that are hosted here on Halcydon.com.
Escrow.com
Using escrow, it is best to contact us directly and we can work with an Escrow.com agent. Escrow.com serves as the broker; they will hold your funds, and hold the domain via a concierge service. When both Halcydon and the buyer agree on a price and any conditions, they escrow releases the funds and the domain.
Escrow.com is one of the most cost effective ways for the seller and buyer since the commission is as low as 6.3%. This fee will be covered by Halcydon Identity.
Epik.com
Epik Domains that is another services that offers an escrow service for buyers and sellers. They operate in the same many of Escrow.com, holding the domain and money, from the buyer seller and releasing them when all parties agree to the final transaction.
The difference is that Epik fees are 75$ USD per transaction, which makes Escrow.com cheaper to use for domains that are less than 1,200$USD.
If you have any other further questions, please contact via our contact form or send an email to hello (at) halcydon.com.