Nowadays it is increasingly becoming common for most of the domain investors to put a BIN price on their respective inventory of names. A BIN offers a wider market and BIN based domains appear on registration path or search results at most of the major domain registrars with a solid base of customers.
Various domainers have their own way of evaluating and pricing an appropriate BIN on their domain names. And, there is no set of rules. A BIN can be placed for 99000 upward to millions. (As far as I checked)
I heard and read investors selling domains at BIN for hundreds of thousands. So, there is an advantage tied up with BIN.
But, if your BIN is too low – you lose money on the sale. And, if it’s too high you lose the sale. A balanced approach is all needed. Basically, BIN pricing is a strategic and thoughtful activity. And, not just putting some numbers out of no thinking to details and domains worth. Even domains you think are not that worth – needs evaluation. Here are my tips on BIN setting:
- Industry: Each domain name has its category – especially if it’s a dictionary-based domain name. For example, look at this post at Quora that outlines industry by worth. https://www.quora.com/Which-are-the-worlds-biggest-industries-in-dollars and here is the list of most profitable businesses https://www.forbes.com/pictures/feki45efjgh/the-15-most-profitable-i/#418f47dc7a39
- Based on the technical aspects of your domain name, like extension, two-word, or one word, end-users using a similar keyword. And, then the industry worth can be used as a guide to making a BIN.
- Remember you are pricing a domain which is actually your product. So, you have to remember the cost of acquisition, renewals costs incurred and most importantly the intellectual capacity you exercised in acquiring and retaining such a valuable digital asset
- Personal or Business: You have to know that bearing a few exceptions if you are selling a domain to others for personal use – it will fetch not many dollars compare to businesses. So, remember your domain fits a business use or personal use. And, decide the BIN price accordingly.
- Psychological Pricing: It’s believed and well-tested that certain prices have a psychological impact on buyers. We often notice prices in the form of 1.99 or 3.99 or 10.99. The buyer often disregards the other units of price. So, prices such as $1.99 may to some degree be associated with spending $1 rather than $2. So, keep pricing your domain like 999, 1999, 2999, and so on. More can be read here. Charm Pricing
- Avoid Automated Tools: There are automated tools that value a certain domain name based on its keyword searches per month as per Google and the pay per click cost paid by advertisers for that keyword. Also, they based their valuation on previously reported sale for similar domain names. All is good for reading – but when it comes to pricing your BIN you should take it as a grain of salt. Every domain is unique and manual research is required to put a BIN
- Wholesale or Retail: If your model of domain investing is built around serving wholesale customers – then you need to adapt to a totally different model then the one works for retail buyers. This post is for the retail pricing of a domain name.
- Financially Viable: Most of the time a BIN pricing results in no communication between a seller and the buyer. The transaction goes automatically or it’s negotiated by the sales-channel partner. Hence, you have to make sure that you are going to sell a domain to financially well-built companies. A financially sound company pays the right amount. And, have the system to account for the same through their financial statements.
- Marketing Cost Vs Domain Cost: Good companies spends a lot of dollars on marketing. Big companies have a big budget and they spend a huge amount of dollars on several forms of advertising. If your domain is suitable for larger companies – your BIN should not be like a drop in the bucket. At the same time, smaller companies also invest in advertising and they have a percentage of the budget allocated for the same. For example review it here https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/much-small-businesses-spend-on-advertising-marketing.html
- So, based on all the above – I think a reasonably good domain name with a dot com extension should always be priced 4999 and above. Anything less than this figure can be construed as an unseen loss.