Where to sell a domain, and what each venue costs you

Ask where you should sell a domain and the useful answer is a question back: what is it worth? A name that will fetch £300 and a name that will fetch £30,000 do not belong in the same room. Choose wrong and the loss dwarfs any commission you were trying to dodge.

So: what each channel charges, what the charge actually buys, and where the money quietly leaks.

The price band chooses the venue, not your preference

Percentages are the least interesting number in this whole business. The question is whether a venue puts your name in front of people who can pay what you're asking.

• Under about £500. Volume venues and auctions. Your buyers are other investors and small businesses watching every pound. You're optimising for liquidity, not price.
• £500 to roughly £25,000. Curated marketplaces, buy-it-now pricing, a landing page on the domain itself. This is where most end-user sales happen, and inbound enquiry does nearly all the work.
• Above roughly £25,000. Brokered, or outbound to a shortlist of companies for whom the name is strategically obvious. You're no longer selling to a market. You're selling to one or two plausible buyers.

Drop a £40,000 name into a liquidation auction and you'll clear £900. Hand a £400 name to a broker and you'll get a courteous no, followed by six months of silence.

What a 10-20% marketplace cut is really paying for

The mainstream marketplaces cluster in a similar band. Commission on a completed sale usually falls between 10% and 20%, varying with the platform, whether your listing is exclusive, and sometimes with the sale price itself. Some tier downwards as values rise. Several add or waive fees depending on whether the buyer arrived through a distribution partner. Rate cards get revised, so read the live one rather than a figure you half-remember from a forum thread in 2019.

On Names.com, sellers pay 15% on a completed sale, and nothing otherwise. Buyers pay no fee. No listing charge, no listing renewal, no bill if the name sits untouched for two years.

On any marketplace worth using, the commission buys four things, and they're worth naming plainly.

• Distribution. Your name shows up where people go looking for domains, rather than only on a page you happen to control.
• A parked landing page. A large share of sales begin with somebody typing the name into a browser to see whether it's taken. Land them on a for-sale page with a price and a button and you have a transaction. Land them on a registrar holding page and you have nothing at all.
• Escrow and transfer handling. Neither party has to go first. On Names.com the funds sit in escrow until the name moves.
• Buyer trust. A stranger will send five figures to a marketplace. That same stranger will not send five figures to your PayPal address.

Sellers consistently underprice that last one. Most of what you're buying is the removal of the buyer's fear.

Brokers charge the same percentage for entirely different work

Broker rates sit in roughly the same range, occasionally with a minimum fee or a retainer attached to larger mandates. Identical arithmetic, wholly different job.

A broker goes outbound. They work out who ought to own the name, get to the person who can authorise the spend, run a negotiation that may drag across months, and hold a price you would almost certainly have caved on by week three. Where the realistic buyer pool is two or three companies, every point of that commission earns itself back, because your version of the process is emailing a general enquiries inbox and never hearing anything.

They're picky, mind. Most brokers decline anything they can't see clearing five figures, since the effort per deal barely moves with the price. A pass from a broker is free valuation feedback. Take it as such.

Auctions are fast, cheap to enter and unkind to your number

Auction commissions land in a comparable range, sometimes with a modest listing fee, sometimes tiered so that smaller sales pay a higher percentage. The fees aren't the issue. The room is.

Auction bidders are overwhelmingly resellers, and a reseller bids on what they think they can flip the name for, less their margin and their holding cost. Auction prices therefore settle at a fraction of end-user prices for the identical asset. Not a defect. The whole design. You are exchanging price for speed and certainty.

Auction when you want the name off your renewal list this month, when it's genuinely generic and liquid, or when you're thinning a portfolio. Don't auction the one strong brandable you've been sitting on since 2018.

Direct sales have the cheapest headline rate and the highest real cost

Nothing stops you putting up your own page, negotiating over email and paying only escrow. Escrow services generally take low single-digit percentages, often under 1% on larger transactions, with a floor of some tens of pounds at the small end. Split it, or push it to the buyer, and it's close to noise.

Then come the charges that never appear on an invoice.

• Discovery. No distribution, no inbound. You're waiting on people to guess the name and stumble onto a for-sale page.
• Trust friction. Serious buyers want to know who they're dealing with. A few will walk rather than find out.
• Negotiating alone. First-time sellers anchor low and then concede quickly. A 20% pricing error makes a 15% commission look like a rounding difference.
• Time. Hours of email, verification, transfer coordination, chasing.

There is one scenario where direct is clearly right: a buyer has already come to you unprompted and named a figure. You don't need distribution then. You need a safe way to move the asset.

The line items nobody prints on the rate card

Price these in before you commit to a channel.

• Holding cost. Renewals compound. A decade of typical .com renewals is real money sunk, and it hasn't added a penny to what the name is worth.
• Exclusivity terms. Some listings tie you up for a period, or apply commission to sales you sourced yourself. Read the clause covering buyers who contacted you before you ever listed.
• Payout timing. There's a hold after the transfer completes. Days, sometimes a fortnight. Plan your cash flow around it.
• Transfer mechanics. A domain sitting inside a 60-day post-registration or post-transfer lock cannot move. Check that before you accept an offer.
• Currency and tax. Cross-border deals pick up conversion spread, and proceeds are usually taxable. If the number matters, speak to an accountant.

Three questions, in this order

Can you name specific companies for whom this domain is the obvious answer? If yes, and you're in five figures, go brokered or outbound. Is the name brandable and priced at a level a founder would pay without haggling? List it buy-it-now and let inbound come to you. Do you simply want rid of it? Auction, and accept the haircut.

The costly error was never choosing the venue with the higher commission. It's choosing a venue whose buyers can't afford your name, then cutting the price until they can.