I have had a domain that I have been considering selling for some time. I had no idea where to start when selling a domain name, but I thought a good place to start was to find out what my domain name might be worth.
So I Googled “domain valuation” and I quickly found that what I should have searched for was “domain name appraisal”. I came across a website called domaining.com that has a list of domain name appraisal websites.
The most important feature I am looking for here is a “link to this appraisal” link – so that wherever I decide to sell my domain name, (i.e. eBay) I can link to the appraisal.
Domain Name Appraisal Services
Valuate.com: I used valuate.com first because it was the first one in the list. When you first hit the page there’s a box where you type your domains one by one spearated by a line return. Getting an appraisal is as easy as clicking the Valuate button. However, there is no “link to this valuation” link which is what I need.
estibot.com: estibot.com offers a simple box to search with. So I entered the domain name in the box and clicked the “appraise” button. I received my appraisal imediately and more importantly, it gave me a “link to this appraisal” link for my eBay auction. – Great, this is exaclty what we wanted! … or was it?
When I clicked the link and tried to go to the appraisal I got this message: “Daily guest query limit reached. Please login or register to continue using the service.“. Thumbs down! It seems that estibot.com only allows a couple of appraisal requests per day. I would have thought that the link they provide would be to the actual appraisal that they have just given, but instead of this, the link is to a whole new appraisal request. Come on, estibot.com, the link should be to the actual appraisal.
groupvaluation.com: This website asks me to create an account before proceeding! No-way, no thanks! That’s put me off straight away! Moving on…
DomainAppraisal.org: This company wanted a minimum of $29.99. What! No thanks! Moving on…
SwiftAppraisal.com: I found it quite difficult to find how to start with this website, then I found “Click here for a totally free domain appraisal!” – this is 2011, where is the nice big web 2.0 button saying “Domain Appraisal”? Anyway, the experience of using this website started getting quite tiresome to say the least, maybe someone should recommend a short course on website usability. After 8, yes eight, page loads (including a captcha image) I finally got an appraisal. It was $8,000 less than the appraisal by valuate.com and estibot.com and there was no “link to this valuation” link. No good to me.
DomainTops.com: I couldn’t get this website working. Therefore I cannot provide any details about this service.
Conclusion
Although it seems that none of the websites I found that offer a free domain name valuation offered everything I needed, I would say that estibot.com was the closest to the mark. And although they only allowed a couple of requests per IP address per day, that’s plenty if you’re using it for eBay or something as the potential buyer is only likely to click the appraisal link once.
So on this occasion, it’s estibot.com that wins the day.
