From all of us at domains.ng, we thank you for a blissful 2021; the year ended with a special promo for $12 registration of .ng domains without a cap. Although the sales weren't mind-blowing, we attribute that to our lack of marketing which will change this year. Let's dive into what we have done in the first quarter of 2022.
1. Domain Backorders:
We have been working on automating the entire backorder process; earlier, we collected the requests manually via email and processed them internally. We also ordered a single request per domain name on a first-come-first-served basis. This process was cumbersome and full of flaws. We could have avoided it, but we needed to pilot and understand our niche market.
Eventually, we were able to automate the entire process, from ordering a backorder to capturing the domain. We can now accept multiple backorders to understand how wanted a domain name is and enable us to bring the next phase of our services, domain auctions. If a domain receives multiple backorders, it is automatically sent to an auction, inviting all interested parties with little to no effort from us.
We have also improved our backorder engine; it is now twice as fast and accurate in getting you the domains you want.
2. Domain Auctions:
Learning from the industry and inspirations, we built an in-house auctioning tool that allows any domain registered with us to enter into an auction automatically for backorders and manually for domain names that we own. This auction is designed to start at a given time (24hrs by default) after initiating an auction to ensure participants are notified early enough and end 24 - 72hrs depending on the settings. The highest bidder will always get the domain, but only at the expense of what the second-highest bidder was willing to pay.
Our auction tool is inspired by Vickrey Auction or Sealed-Bid Second-Price Auction (SBSPA), which led us to introduce proxy bids. Proxy bids let us accept very high bids but issue them in tranches automatically for the bidder; with this, a bidder can give his highest bid at once without waiting to participate in the auction. Our system will do the bid issuing until the highest value is exhausted.
We will be working on more additions this quarter, some of which include:
- Escrow API (in partnership with other domain marketplaces)
- Email Solution (for domain owners that want to utilize their domain with affordable email hosting)
- Improve Existing Services (a few esthetics and user experience tweaks)
Wednesday, May 4, 2022