Fresh Service Hopes to Make Seller-Financed Domain Transactions Easier

Service manages seller financed domain sales.

A fresh service called Zenscrow hopes to bring more liquidity to the domain name market by making seller financed domain sales easier.

Firms such as Escrow.com and Moniker by now offer payment plan escrow services, but Zenscrow takes it a step further. There are two benefits I see to Zenscrow compared to typical payment plan services.

First, Zenscrow provides a domain sale or lease agreement.

Second, the firm monitors the use of the domain name during the financing period.

This second feature is notable. You might sell a domain to someone on a payment plan, only to find out they are using the domain name in a way that hurts its value. If they later stop making payments you get the domain name back but it’s damaged goods.

For example, the buyer might try search engine tricks that get the domain banned from Google, post infringing materials that result in a domain seizure or lawsuit, or use a generic domain that happens to be also be a trademark in a way that risks a UDRP case.

I’m not sure how much of a burden self-monitoring would be if you only have a few seller financed deals, but I can see the value if you handle many of these types of sales. And some monitoring, such as search engine tricks, might be difficult to monitor as an individual.

Zenscrow charges 0.25% of the domain purchase price per month with a $99/month minimum. The firm doesn’t actually handle the escrow itself; this is handled by the client’s choice of either Escrow.com or the Law Office of Howard Neu. There’s a 0.89% escrow fee at the beginning of the transaction.