Unless you have been living under a rock for the past months you probably know that after May 25th public access to WHOIS is going to change when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into full effect. This privacy regulation will have a major impact on the domain name industry and how buyers find domain name owners.
When registries and/or registrars remove your name and contact information from the public WHOIS, this makes it pretty much impossible for buyers to research ownership of domain names to confirm ownership for a purchase or to inquire about buying a domain name in your portfolio.
In a recent DomainSherpa episode about GDPR, Andrew Rosener, CEO at domain name brokerage firm Media Options said:
“You need to put up a landing page or you need to have something on the landing page that gives people an option to access you because otherwise, you are going to be beholden to a Sedo and then Afternic and your registrar”
With more than 40+ different For-Sale landing page templates to choose from as well as an option to redirect all of your domain names to your own, custom domain name marketplace, Efty users are doing exactly that.
At Efty, we offer a myriad of features and customization options for domain name owners who understand the importance of a beautiful For-Sale landing page and for that reason we’re home to thousands of the world’s most valuable aftermarket domain names from portfolios of sellers and top-brokers around the globe.
With Efty you can:
- Write a custom description and unique selling points for each landing page.
- Upload a custom logo or background for each landing page.
- Choose from 40+ different templates including Make Offer, Buy-It-Now only and UDRP safe templates.
- Set a Minimum Offer amount.
- Force potential buyers to verify their email address before submitting an offer.
- Collect Name, E-mail, Phone number and IP address of potential buyers.
- Integrate with Escrow.com, DAN.COM, PayPal or Stripe to collect payment.
- Redirect visitors to SSL secure landing pages on Efty.com or your own custom marketplace.
- And last but not least: pay ZERO in commissions when your domains sell.
Be prepared and organized when public WHOIS goes dark later this month and make it easy for buyers to reach you or immediately purchase your domains without relying on external marketplaces and their commissions. Sign up for Efty today.
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How does Efty verify domain ownership without public whois when people list their domains?
With the integrations to escrow.com etc., how does Efty inform a European domain buyer of those relationsships and which data is being passed on (in accordance with GDPR regulations)?
The same question goes for buyer’s data passed on to the domain owner. On the landers I checked, I don’t see any privacy & data information on the form the buyer fills out.
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Great questions Frank. This post is really about Efty making it easy for buyers to reach domain name owners after that are using our For-Sale landing pages after Whois contact information will be unavailable.
Efty isn’t a marketplace such as Sedo where people can “list” their domains hence there’s only a need for us to verify ownership when someone ads a domain name that is already in another Efty user’s account.
Efty doesn’t act as a middleman for escrow transactions so I can’t comment on that question but I have asked our contacts at these companies for a comment about what they are doing in preparation for GDRP and will update my comment once I hear back.
Update May 11: Escrow.com has informed us that they follow all financial and data privacy regulations within the jurisdictions in which they operate, which included GDPR and Payoneer shared with us that their systems are compliant with the countries they operate in.
I am happy to share we are working on providing our sellers with the necessary tools to be GDPR compliant in a new version of the platform we will roll out soon. Keep an eye on our blog for updates.
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Thank you for the response and the update, I’m aware of the differences, and that the post wasn’t exactly about this.
Unfortunately, you can’t “solve” the GDPR problems without addressing how you process information, especially if it is passed on to third parties from the landers. Looking forward to reading more about the details, it’s an interesting challenge for all of us.
Just to be clear – I purely asked out of my personal interest in the new legislation and privacy rules in general, not for any of my clients.
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