It appears that a significant benefit Afternic derives from having so many partner sellers is that the partners can handle the work of providing some search capability to buyers, because Afternic doesn’t have any such thing. Their database cannot really be searched on their site.
On the home page, to start with, Afternic has 3 columns: Premium Domains, Trending, and New Listings.
Premium has 7 names there, and a link at the bottom to view more. Click it, and you’ll get a whopping 4 more.
Trending has 4 domains listed. No link to see any others.
New Listings has 7 domains showing, and a link to many more — in one of those awful, continually-expanding lower pages where you just keep pulling the bar at the side down to the bottom again and again. This is obviously where the gold is. However, I cannot search within these new ones in any manner at all, as far as I can see.
Going back to the home page, try to use the Search field. You can type in a keyword and then choose one extension, or All. What appears is a short list of 20 related domains, whether I’ve entered a keyword and chose “All” extensions, chose one extension. The list of 20 begins with a number of various extensions after the keyword entered, then a few .coms with a second keyword added. There is no expanding bottom in this case. All I get are those 20 results.
Despite the page’s saying “our advanced search will let you filter by price, category, length, extension and much more,” this isn’t true; there is no advanced search. No categories or price or length to choose at all. You can filter the word by extension only.
In other words, their database cannot be searched. On my website (still under construction) our webmaster quickly made a very nice search capability, and you can search for everything under some extensions, or search for a keyword, or partial keyword. You can also choose a category — and you’ll see paginated results, not that continuous expanding bottom. So you’ll know when you’ve reached the end, and can go backwards easily as well.
So why can’t Afternic, with all its resources, make it possible for prospective buyers to search for anyone’s domains? And how much does this reduce sales? Every failed search means names did not get shown to a buyer. Afternic’s search deficit is almost a total blackout.
