What Do You Think of The New Afternic?

You’ve probably already heard (or seen) that Afternic  underwent a major upgrade at the end of last week. The new website looks sleek, and it makes searching for domain names far easier than before.

In the company’s words, here’s some information about the upgrade provided in the press release distributed on October 5:

The new Afternic is a clean, simplified, improved user experience that facilitates premium domain transactions for both buyers and sellers.  New seller profiles allow members to promote themselves and their domains through unique URLs, searchable profile pages, featured listings, and social media sharing. A customizable dashboard enables easy editing, offer management, and personalized reporting to easily track transactions. Both buyers and sellers will benefit from more structured and transparent communication, ensuring that more leads translate into sales.   In addition to these upgrades, the new Afternic features a simplified escrow process and an improved shopping cart experience.

One thing I noticed when I tried out the new Afternic is that I didn’t have the ability to search for a particular keyword at the end of the domain name… i.e. Management.com domain names. I’ve already emailed them to ask where this functionality is (or if they could add it).

One thing which I’ve come to appreciate about NameMedia properties is that when I’ve found something buggy or had a suggestion to make something easier, the company has always seemed to appreciate the feedback.

I welcome you to submit your feedback here about the new website, and I will make sure it gets in front of the right person. Let me know if you see something buggy or want to make a feature easier to use. Ultimately, what do you think of the new and improved Afternic website?

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

31 COMMENTS

  1. The interface looks pretty cool and fresh. I just can’t figure why they would have .gov and .edu under the extensions that you can buy, both of which are restricted TLDs.

  2. Graphically it looks much better
    Professionally not so good. For example they completely ignored the trends I mean .me, .tv and .co are NOT listed among the “Most Common Extensions”.
    As far as the functionality of the search filter is concerned, I can honestly say – SEDOs search mechanism is much better and user friendly
    As an average user I am a little bit disappointed
    regards

  3. I logged into my Afternic account yesterday for a short while. Saw I could add my photo, but not much else I can change. You now have a url to your own afternic page. It looks better, but thought I could do more personalization – adding social media accounts, etc. I only had a quick look, I plan to take some more time to check it over.

  4. One step forward two step backward ..
    (((((((Hello afternic)))))) it looks like wptheme that you can buy for less then $49.99 and what the hell with all that drop down login, buy domain, sell and all the bell and whistle .. So, last year .. You guys have to stop following name.com
    I will have to say make it “simple and user friendly” .
    Get rid of those bell and whistle ..Right now.
    p.s Get rid of those dissolving banner on the front page .. For a sec i had forgotten why was i in afternic site … Very distracting.

  5. Sorting columns no longer exists which is a complete interface failure.

    There’s ridiculous “lowest offer ” stuff in there too like $1m priced make offer name that say lowest min. offer is $700 . Huh ?

    There needs to be an advanced search feature.

    Many links and pages are still 404’ing and the 404 is really bad from a user experience perspective. customize it guys.

    did anyone beta test this thing ? sheesh. ask your users to test before going live.

    all in all it’s WORLDS better looking than sedo or anyone elese but I bet they see a significant drop in conversions with this new design/format.

  6. Hi Elliot:

    I like the cleaner look, the nice font, the smooth colors. However, functionally I am not a fan yet. Just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out parking stats and I failed.

  7. I like the new clean look. However, I’m finding the new site is crashing in IE. I can view it fine though in Firefox and Chrome.

    Have noticed several errors:

    1. Clicking on view all listings displays only 10, even when 100’s more are in the account. No way to display the rest of the listings.

    2. My biggest complaint is the auto removal of one’s listings when you edit the price and the immediate notification of “pending review”. Your domain will disappear from the entire Afternic network while staff at Afternic decide if your price change is “approved” (which takes days, even weeks). I find this completely unacceptable and hope Afternic change this. It’s the single most disturbing element of membership on the site. Having your priced domains suddenly removed from the site while buyers are browsing undermines everyone’s goals. Please Afternic, change this asap.

  8. I like the look of it but as usual when accessing my parking stats etc I get absolutely nothing back. Previously I saw a table with no data and was told I could email to get the stats every time I wanted to look at them…Now I get taken to the list of my domains…Looks better but then thats probably not what we keep customers no matter how important.

  9. Thanks to everyone for your feedback on the new Afternic. We are listening carefully to all your comments and will post a response to all the questions raised here shortly. If you have any specific issues with your account that need immediate attention, please contact your account rep or customer service at 866-351-9586. While we realize that this is a major change to Afternic, we also hope you understand our primary objective is to create the best platform for the secondary market and we will continue to invest in the platform and listen to your feedback to fulfill that objective.

    Karen Dixon
    Director of Marketing
    Afternic

  10. Hate the new design. They should focus more on improving customer service and back-end functionality. For examples, it takes me 2 to 3 emails to get an answer from parking support and a recent technical issue resulted in me not being notified about a mid-$x,xxx sale from my portfoilio for 4 days (luckily I found it when adding another domain to my account).

  11. Thanks for all of your comments on the new site. As with any major site overhaul, there are a number of things that take a few days to completely implement (like the redirects on all the pages from the previous site, or the glitches from certain browsers) and there are other improvements that will be part of future releases in the days and weeks to come. Here is some specific comments based on your feedback: 

    –          This is a known issue for the new Member’s profile page (specifically, the number of listings that are shown) and we have a fix for this and are looking to release to market.  We find this to be a very valuable page to our  customer’s buyers and plan to introduce additional search with filtering features in the near future.

    Our domain integrity process is intended to ensure there are high quality domain listed in the aftermarket.  It is by no means our intent to dictate domain value but provide guidelines for our customers.  If you’re experiencing issues, please contact our Customer Service team for assistance.

    We brought together the selling and parking into the portfolio view so that our customer could have a single view into their portfolio configuration and performance—both marketplace information and parking statistics.  We have provided features to customize your view by adding, reordering and removing columns.  Click on the area above the columns in portfolio view and will see an interactive dialogue box that allows you to customize your view—including adding all of your parking statistics.  This is an important feature to help you understand your parking earning to better price and promote your domains in the aftermarket. If you are unable to see your parking performance, please contact our Customer Service team and they will address immediately.

    You can also reach the product team directly by emailing  pnguyen@afternic.com or support at support@afternic.com for assistance.

  12. There is plenty of room for improvement, as of yet IU have only used SEDO for the purpose oif selling domain names, but will create an account with Afternic in order to fully compare it with what I’ve been used to.
    On first impressiomns it could have a better layout to make iot more user friendly, but thats on first appearances only.

  13. I have 9 domains pending review. Which ones? I couldn’t tell you because the new design won’t show me any view.

    Why do I have to scroll down the entire page to find out that I have a Price Request? Don’t tell me that I will get an e-mail about it cause I know your e-mail for sale notifications was down the otehr day.

    These are just for starters. Did you actually have any users actually test the design before you implemented it?

  14. Will someone please tell me what the business relationship is between Afternic and SmartName? If I have a parking problem, they literally have to hand me off to the other company, which takes an extra day for the otehr person to respond. I’m guessing they sit right next to each other in the office.

  15. @Karen
    Sad to say but to me, as an average domainer, SEDO offers much better variety of analysis regarding parked domains as well as what’s going on as far as the current sales (in-general) are concerned with NO delay, on daily bases. It is a very valuable data upon which I can build my sales – purchasing strategies. Right now I have over 1000 domains parked at Afternic and almost no knowledge which onces have a chance of selling and at what price. Please take a look at SEDO’s functionality and implement such algorithms. For example what’d be revolutionary and boost sales is if a user (potential buyer) looking up a domain (which I see as “Visits”) had the option of telling me at what price he/she would buy this particular domain, with no obligation to do anything more at this point (thats what differs it from “make offer”). That’d give me an information on how far off my price is from possible demand). It’d be wonderful if that same person who showed interest in a domain, was notified once I adjusted the price. The other problem I’ve already mentioned is that .tv .me and .co are not just ordinary cctlds. They should be listed as Most common extensions (just look at GoDaddy and SEDO and what’s number two, three and four there unless You’re going against the main trends).
    best of luck

  16. Thanks for the opportunity to reply to your concerns, and to provide you and your readers with the most up to date information on the Afternic re-launch. We are committed to providing you with the best user experience in the aftermarket. Below is an update as of today (Friday 10/12/21) on the outstanding questions you have.

    We released an update this week that allows users to view more listings from members profile page.

    Grouping feature: we offered this functionality in the old site, and we will be re-implementing this functionality in the form of name tagging in a future release.

    @Spike: We released filtering options today that will allow you to select pending review.

    As always, if you have any specific questions or concerns about your account, please contact customer service at 866-351-9586 or email Service@Afternic.com.

  17. One additional change I’d like to see is the ability to select all messages from Afternic in my control panel at once and mark them all as read. Right now, I can only select 10 at a time, and I have over 100 messages.

  18. I believe this design was not properly tested and was rushed because of TRAFFIC. It went live on Friday and I did a big review on it during the TRAFFIC weekend and a lot of the improvements I suggested have been fixed. Especially the privacy settings are great.
    Afternic has fixed a few of the problems but serious problems remain.
    Afternic has been very responsive posting comments both here and on my blog and fixing a lot of the issues very fast. Rushing a launch because of marketing will only harm a company.
    I develop software too and I never listen to my clients urges to rush projects because I know I will regret it later.

    • I would imagine having a pre-TRAFFIC release was key to generating buzz and getting feedback. I don’t know whether or not they rushed the release, but I am glad they are receptive to feedback.

      I wish other companies were as receptive to feedback.

    • Nobody needs bad buzz and bug feedback.
      That is what beta testing is for. And beta testing is done by actual users as you said. I found all the bugs in a couple of hours. I am sure there are a few more as I didn’t test the parking section at all.

      The release felt rushed and I think Afternic realized it and that is why they try so hard to fix everything. One other rule in software is to never ever release software on Friday afternoon. NEVER.

      They listen to customers unlike some other company (hint) that keeps changing the layout and hasn’t listened to a single problem I have had.

    • Valid points, although I am not less likely to use Afternic as a result. I’m actually more inclined because of the improved search functionality.

  19. I have deleted all domains and my portfolio is really empty but in the dashboard appear that i hav 2 domains listed…..its crazy. I want close my account but i am still waitin !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  20. Can anyone tell me what THEME they’re using for their members area? (you’ll need to log into your Afternic account to see it)

    It may be on themeforest.net or one of the other theme websites. In the WordPress themes section or non-WordPress themes.

    If you find the exact one, or similar one, please get in touch! Trish : – )
    trish789 ((at)) gmail ((dotcom))

  21. (updated post)

    Can anyone tell me what THEME Afternic is using in the SELL DOMAINS section of their members area? (you’ll need to log into your Afternic account to see it)

    It may be on themeforest.net or one of the other theme websites. In the WordPress themes section or non-WordPress themes.

    If you find the exact one, or similar one, please get in touch! Trish : – )
    trish789 ((at)) gmail ((dotcom))

  22. The new AfterNic hasn’t changed in 3 years, and has WAY too many bugs in it. No sorting? Really? Way too dependent on JavaScript and too bouncy (very annoying)
    They need programmers, not designers and script kiddies!
    Don’t take my word for it, just trace all the HTTP errors.

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