Bug kills domain sales — Afternic checkout

A negotiated sale fell apart when Afternic couldn’t handle a .fi transaction.

A couple of weeks ago, I “sold” a .fi domain through Afternic.

I have regarding 5 .fi domains, and I was excited to reach an agreement to sell one of them that I hand-registered a couple of years ago.

The transaction came together following the buyer submitted an offer on the domain, which used the Afternic lander. I have “make offer” set to self-brokerage, which means I negotiated directly with the buyer.

Following we agreed on a price, the buyer tried to check out. That’s when things went downhill. The messages below are in last-in, first-out order:

As you can see, the buyer tried to make the payment, but it wouldn’t work.

Following speaking with Afternic, I learned that whenever someone tries to buy a .fi domain through Afternic, the payment will fail since GoDaddy doesn’t support .fi domains.

Afternic suggested a workaround: lower the price to the negotiated number, and then ask the buyer to purchase the domain through the Afternic DLS partner 101Domain.

I tried to communicate this to the buyer, but the self-brokerage commenting system blocked my message.

An Afternic representative reached out to the buyer a number of times, to no avail. At this point, the sale is likely lost.

When you sell a domain, it’s crucial to get the payment right away ahead of the buyer changes their mind. Any friction can kill the deal.

This sale would have gone through if Afternic’s cart hadn’t given an error.

Needless to say, I don’t think Afternic ought to have a situation where the shopping cart breaks every time someone tries to buy a domain that GoDaddy doesn’t support.

There’s value in listing .fi domains on Afternic to gain access to the distribution network. But in the future, I certainly won’t point these domains to the landing pages there. I think I’ll start pointing my .fi domains to Atom or Sedo.