Simple and effective integration of domains for sale.
A lot of large domain name registrars offer Afternic’s “Premium” inventory to customers. Each registrar integrates it differently and some do it better than others.
I just checked out Hover.com’s integration and I really like it. Hover is owned by Tucows, which is Afternic’s latest top 10 domain registrar partner.
Hover is known for its simplicity and this carries through to premium domains. It manages to integrate premium domains with simplicity but also make them standout.
As you can see, premium domains are denoted with a star. If you mouseover the star there’s a brief description and a link to a detailed description. The detailed description even includes a video explanation.
The video explains that domain pricing reverts to regular pricing for subsequent years. Hover’s shopping cart also handles multi-year registrations of premium domains.
This is one of the better implementations I’ve seen and should be a model for other domain name registrars.
Adam says
Looks good . We can probably assume it does convert better, but it’d be nice to see some more testing and experiments in this area. Really there hasn’t been much experimenting so anything new seems good/new/refreshing than the tired old ways, but those old methods may not be the best converting. I know registrars aren’t going to share this info but maybe the venues like afternic and sedo can give some case studies in best practices in page layouts and placement to maximize those sales conversions. I don’t expect much though as those 2 sites don’t seem to do much conversion testing on domain landers or their own home pages either. Sedo being one of the most egregious in bad design and likely bad conversion rates. I’d love to see the numbers.
Ellen O'Brien says
Adam: We actually do quite a bit of conversion testing and offer all of our partners ongoing support as to “best practices” with respect to integration of premium domains in order to maximize sales of listed domains. It’s not something advertised to the general public, but a contributing factor in the 94% year-over-year jump in DLS domain sales for the first half of 2011. On our parked pages, in particular, there is very close measurement of conversion, as we seek to offer our members the best possible monetization on their domains—both from parking revenue and from sales. Again, not something that we share in detailed case studies, but a key reason that DLS is the world’s fastest-growing marketplace.
Always happy to answer any additional questions. Please feel free to reach out directly: eobrien [at ]namemedia.com