Of the seven platforms we reviewed, GoDaddy Auction is our favorite domain auction site. It is one of the largest domain marketplaces in the world, and it extends to users supporting services like domain renewal, hosting, and website building. Plus, you’ll never be in the dark with GoDaddy’s extensive knowledge base, excellent customer support, and buyer and seller tools to guarantee secure transactions.
Top Domain Auction Sites: Golden Eggs
Below are our Golden Eggs, the best domain auction sites from the dozens of online marketplaces we researched and tested.
GoDaddy Auction delivers an extensive catalog of premium, used, new, and expired domains for sale, as well as great tools for both buyers and sellers. Purchase a GoDaddy membership today and bid on your favorite domain with no buyer fees.
Flippa offers a platform to buy and sell digital assets, including websites, ecommerce businesses, and apps in addition to domains. Create a free Flippa account and browse more than 10,000 domain listings.
Sedo offers multiple domain buying and selling options, including auctions, direct selling, and offer-based transactions. Get started today on Sedo and enjoy free domain appraisal, parking, and transfer.
Best Domain Auction Sites Review Process
Most domain auction sites share more similarities than differences. Bearing this in mind, we sought to categorize the sites we review below based on what use cases they come in most handy for. For example, the quantity of selection is more important than quality if you’re bargain-hunting for a domain. However, thorough due diligence is far more critical when purchasing premium URLs.
We identified the most common use cases for needing a domain auction site in order to split our reviews into three recognizable scenarios:
- Finding a bargain price when purchasing a domain
- Acquiring an established domain name
- Selling your own domain via auction
By lumping our reviews into these categories, we hope to make it easier for you to spot the best options for the situation you find yourself in. All eight auction sites reviewed in this post are reliable options for finding or selling a domain name. It’s just that some auction sites work better for specific scenarios than others.
Nevertheless, our categorization isn’t cast in stone. So don’t be afraid to check out each of our auction site reviews below and assess which one best meets your requirements.
Best Domain Auction Sites for Finding a Bargain
Finding a suitable domain name is easy if you aren’t dead-set on an exact name match or a .com top-level domain (TLD). In this case, you can find a bargain by using a domain auction site that offers variety. These options are also ideal if you don’t have a domain in mind and are looking for inspiration for your URL and a fair price.
Afternic
Afternic now runs on the same modern purchase path as GoDaddy, so it’s much easier to browse, filter, and buy than it used to be. The platform offers an enormous domain marketplace with millions of domains for sale, and setting up a buyer account is still free.
One of the best things about Afternic is its Fast Transfer service, which pushes eligible domains to buyers automatically so you can take control of the domain in far less time than a standard transfer. You also get access to GoDaddy’s lease-to-own option on many Afternic and former Dan.com landers, which is helpful if you want to spread payments over time.
Because GoDaddy owns Afternic, you’ll also find a variety of high-quality, expired GoDaddy domains in addition to what sellers are offering. You can search for domains by keywords and filter according to category, length, extension, or price. Afternic’s team and tools also help keep pricing realistic, and you can still ask Afternic agents to negotiate for you for a fee.
NamePros
NamePros isn’t technically an auction site. Instead, it is a public forum where people can buy and sell domains. The platform has more than a million members, making it a terrific hub to browse domains and purchase affordable ones.
The forum is perfect for novices who don’t know the first thing about choosing or purchasing a domain name. The platform provides a space to ask questions, or you can refer to the over five million posts and discussions to understand the ins and outs of domain names. You’ll find discussions for domain industry news, beginner’s tips, domain extensions, domain parking, domain traffic monetization, and everything in between.
You don’t need to look far when you’re confident enough to purchase your first domain. Simply head over to the marketplace section to peruse the available listings and purchase your domain or make an offer on one.
The NamePros forum is completely free to join. Its online community also does a good job valuing domains, so most listed domains are fairly priced. NamePros lets you filter domains using metrics like date, numeric, and brandable. Alternatively, you can describe your needs and budget and let domain sellers matching your requirements find you.
Best Domain Auction Sites for Acquiring an Established URL
Premium or established URLs are memorable, marketable, and bring more traffic to your website. However, due diligence is the most crucial aspect of purchasing an established domain. So, you’ll want a domain auction site that makes it easy to assess key metrics like traffic, trust scores, backlinks, and referring domains.
Flippa
Flippa is a marketplace for buying and selling websites, ecommerce businesses, and domain names. It’s perfect for accessing an enormous pool of premium domain listings, with thousands of domains up for sale on Flippa every day that range from budget-conscious options to premium listings.
The marketplace has a handy feature for watching listings that lets you keep track of auctions you’re interested in. However, the platform’s stand-out feature is its advanced filtering. You can filter listings based on domain extensions, domain length, revenue, seller location, and more, letting you focus your search on the exact sort of valuable URLs you seek.
Most listings provide critical information like domain age, industry, expiry, registrar of origin, and more, plus options for either bidding on them or buying one instantly. Flippa also offers an escrow service for safe payments. You’ll have time to review the domain before releasing payment to the seller, making this a safe service for first-time buyers who aren’t experienced in spotting scammers.
GoDaddy Auction
One of the best things about GoDaddy Auction is that anyone can list a domain for sale. So, you aren’t limited to selecting from GoDaddy-registered domains when you use their auction platform. And because GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar, it automatically moves many expired domains to auction 26 days after expiry, which gives you another stream of investment-grade names to bid on in addition to user-listed inventory.
The auction site has offer-style and bid-style purchase options, as well as a buy-it-now option if you want to bypass the bidding or negotiation process. You can see an overview of the domain before bidding, including information like the number of bids or offers, domain traffic, and more, plus filter domains based on criteria like most active, expiring, ending soon, or fixed price.
GoDaddy vets listings and imposes a timeline for public auctions to eliminate scammers and time wasters. The auction site is also a one-stop shop, offering domain registration and renewal, hosting, and other website services under one roof.
Best Domain Auction Sites for Selling Your Domain
If you’re looking to sell instead of buying a domain, you need an auction site that allows you as much control over the sale as possible. For example, you should be able to set a fixed price or put it up for auction for a specific period. The auction site should also let you keep most of your money from the sale, so keep an eye out for associated fees like commission.
Sedo
Sedo is a terrific marketplace for new and seasoned sellers alike. It is affordable, easy to use, and offers multiple listing options. Unlike Flippa and similar marketplaces, Sedo only focuses on buying and selling domains, ensuring you have the right audience.
Registering for a Sedo seller account is free. Once you’re set up, you can list your domain to sell it at a fixed price or receive bids and negotiate the best price. Sedo also offers a variety of auction types for selling, from the marketplace and direct auctions to events and broker-assisted sales.
Many of these options don’t charge a listing fee. Marketplace and standard auctions generally take a 15% commission, while SedoMLS sales and some brokered or boosted listings can rise to around 20%. You can also boost visibility with homepage or category promotion starting at $39 for 30 days.
Sedo also provides supporting features to help you sell your domain faster. For example, the Domain Promotion feature puts your listing on Sedo’s homepage starting at $39 per month. You can also gain more exposure on the SedoMLS sales network with hundreds of registrar partners worldwide.
Efty
It is hard to ignore Efty if you’re a part-time or full-time domain investor. The platform has a slightly higher learning curve than most marketplaces featured on our list. However, you’ll get all the supporting tools you need to run a profitable domain-flipping business.
Efty still charges no marketplace commission on listings if you’re using its investor plans and your own for-sale landers. You buy a plan depending on the number of domains you want to list, starting at $15 per month for up to 50 domains. If you choose to process payments through the newer Efty Pay checkout, there’s now a small transaction commission, but overall costs remain lower than most percentage-based marketplaces.
The cheapest plan offers numerous features, including for-sale landing pages, domain name management, DNS management, and parking and payment integrations. Efty allows sellers to manage extensive domain portfolios at an affordable price.
The marketplace has hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, and you even get a performance dashboard to monitor critical portfolio statistics like sales cost, revenue, and profit at scale.
Namecheap
Namecheap is one of the world’s largest domain registrars. The marketplace has more than 2 million customers, so you have a good chance of selling your domain. It’s a good solution if your domain name is registered with Namecheap.
Namecheap doesn’t charge a listing fee, but you’ll pay a 10% commission after a successful sale. The marketplace offers multiple ways to sell your domain and an appraisal tool to help you price your domain accurately.
You can also choose the listing period, and your earnings are available for withdrawal after a short five-day waiting period. You can move the money to your Namecheap balance right away to pay for renewals, or withdraw to PayPal once you meet the current minimum payout threshold. The only downside is you’ll need to transfer your domain registration to Namecheap if you’re registered with a different registrar.
