How to buy a domain name from someone
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hi my name is Daniel Walter Scott and in this video we're going to look at what happens if somebody else already owns your domain name.
Now there are three things you can do, the first is to go through and pick another domain name, use suggestion tools and find something else that represents your business. I've got some really good tools in the very next video to help you do that type of stuff.
The second is to look at a domain broker. A domain broker is someone who works as an intermediary between you and the seller of the domain. You give the broker boundaries of where you want to spend and they will negotiate a price for you. In terms of brokers we're going to use GoDaddy for this one, there are many out there but because we bought our domain name earlier through them we'll go and do that now. Let's go have a look at how GoDaddy does it.
The best way to find GoDaddy's brokering service is to actually do it through google, it's a little hidden on their website. If you type in 'Domain broker GoDaddy', generally the top result will get you to the right place, they're calling it their 'domain buy service'. The big things to know about this service is the fees. The first fee is their is a $70 fee per domain plus commission plus there is the traditional or standard per-year price for a domain of $15. The big one is this commission, to find out what these two little stars mean is you're going to have to go for a little bit of a hunt I hate it when people hide quite useful, relevant information. I'm going to go into here, it says click here for product disclaimers, now it's 20% of the final fee. Now throw some numbers around - if you end up paying $500, you're going to end up paying an additional $100 to GoDaddy for their help and this can be really handy because it's quite hands off, you let them do the work. If you start getting up a lot higher - say you're paying $10,000 for a domain name, their fee is going to be $2000. So if you take a $500 plus the $100 so $500 is what you're going to pay for the domain name, that's negotiated for the buyer. Plus $100 is their fee, plus the $70 for GoDaddy's signup fee, so there's quite a few fees that go along with this, but the nice thing about domain brokers is that you kind of set and forget, and I've used this service before, I haven't actually bought a domain name through it, I've tried but it hasn't worked out. The process is actually quite nice, I've done it with GoDaddy and it's actually quite good.
Alright one other style of domain brokering and it's kind of similar to the last one we did is, let's look for a domain, I got a domain here, 'thegreengardener.com' I'm going to do a search, and GoDaddy reports back that it's available, and it looks like it's available but sneaky it says 'can be purchased directly from the owner' what this means is that you can kind of enter into this negotiation with the owner. So it's available as in - the owner is prepared to sell it. But you're kind of back to having to negotiate a price and fees involved with that. But that's how a lot of domain names especially .com's are sold as well
My favourite is option number 3, this is where you go off and find who owns a domain name and contact them directly. Now I've had a lot of success with this in the past. So let's go and see some tools we can use to figure out who owns a domain and how you can get in contact with them. To find out who already owns a domain name, what we're going to do is do a regular domain name search. I'm going to search for 'greengardener.com' - search for the domain and you can see it's gone, it's taken. So what we can do is we can scroll right to the bottom of this page and we're looking for something called the 'whois' search, now the whois directory is a list of the details given by the person who registers the domain name and quite often it can have their name and email and phone number, so lets do that search. So 'greengardener.com' - hit search, we're going to have to put in a verification code - no we're not robots trying to do spammy things. Alright success! Now we can see there's a lot of details in the whois listing, what we're looking for is this here registrant name, you can see here it's 'Michael Sciacqua' and you can see the organisation, you can see his address, you can see phone numbers and email addressed, it's a little creepy but it's a great way now to go off and approach Michael and see if he's interested in selling it. He may not be but this is probably the first thing to go and check. Another thing before you go and start hassling Michael if they want to sell it is check, I'm going to do a little search and just see what this website is doing so greengardener.com you can see is doing nothing, it's got a 404 error which means it's pretty terminal, it's not doing anything. We could be in luck, it could be just a domain name that Michael just wants to get rid of.
That'll be it for the techniques to figure out how how to buy a domain name if somebody else owns it.