How important is a beautiful for-sale landing page when selling domains, and can you ask a premium price by doing so?
How important is a beautiful for-sale landing page when selling domains?
Think about Apple Stores — it’s less about the store and more about the experience.
Walk into any Apple Store and you’re greeted by a smiling, friendly sales person who is earnestly concerned with making you happy.
First impressions matter.
Then you’ll notice products are organized by table, gadgets are presented at the exact same angle, and you can touch and play with all of them.
Cables are neatly routed into holes to keep the experience simple. Fingerprints are wiped off the screens at regular intervals.
You could argue that there’s no difference between a Mac and a PC. They both run the exact same programs for gaming, design and office productivity.
Yet Apple is able to charge two, three, four times as much for their products than competing products from Microsoft and Google.
And check out how Apple stock performed in the past couple of decades:
Now I realize that the stock performance is driven by many factors. That’s not lost on me.
But the fact remains that people love the Apple experience.
First impressions matter. Style matters.
So what can we learn from Apple as we think about our domain name for-sale landing pages?
First impressions matter. You want to be greeted by the web page with a specific call to action: this domain name is for sale.
If you are interested in buying this domain name, you’ve come to the right place.
There is no ambiguity. There are no advertisements displayed, no click bait, no confusing calls-to-action on what you want the user to do.
And style matters.
Beautiful graphics, sans serif fonts, and a customizable message focused on benefits makes potential buyers not only consider the opportunities but pay a premium for it.
You’d never see a dirty car for sale on a used car lot. You’d not consider going out on a first date without showering and combing your hair.
So if you want to get a premium price for your domain name, start with a beautiful design, greet your customers, describe how your domain name will benefit them, and have a clear call-to-action message.
Efty Blog 
I’m a designer and there is a big problem where you’re MP requires logo’s in (not necessarily dark but) solid colors, whereas the landing page backgrounds are relatively dark, so they all pretty much look drowned out. A solution would be allow users to upload separate versions of the logo’s. Another soluction would be removing the lines that auto-darken any BG you upload.
For those that have no need for logo’s then I guess it doesn’t matter. But for those that spend time designing brand elements it’s really frustrating. My logo’s look great on my MP, as I prepped them for a white BG, but they look drowned out and crappy on the landing pages.
Also, the compression on the graphics is too much imho. If you’re paying for the bandwidth, yeah I get that it needs compression, but it shouldn’t compromise the quality of the logo to where it’s noticeable.
On that note, I have never seen a case where when paying for a comparative service that they advertise their logo on all pages. This should be for free accounts, or paid account should have the option to hide this. It makes your MP look cheap. The truth is yes Efty created the site, but the consumer is powering it by paying for the service. So in fact it is powered by the consumer in this case. Well, in my opinion at least. Something about the cross branding that makes it look cheap on the domainer-side. The other thing is not having the ability to modify font elements on the MP, but I guess that’s pushing it since I already have all these gripes.
Overall I think it’s a great service with great potential, but these issues have been really aggravating and trying to come up with solutions has wasted my time, which is the opposite of why I signed up.
-Mike
@domainpython.com
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Hi Mike, it’s possible now to show logos on just the landing pages, just the marketplace, or both!
Thanks again for the feedback.
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Hi Mike
Did anyone from Efty reply to your comment?
Best, Neil.
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Hi Neil, Mike and I have had a conversation through email. His input as a designer is really valuable to us and we hope to implement a lot of it in future updates.
I understand that in some cases logos only look good on the marketplace but not on individual landing pages and vice versa. The best solution definitely would be the one suggested by Mike but this is not something that is easy to implement.
As for the “Powered by” logo in the footer, we are considering to add a white label plan next year. More on that later.
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Thanks for sharing ！
Yes, a beautiful for-sale landing page when selling domains is important ,but the most important thing is the domain itself .
Good domains will attract a lot of buyers.
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