Advice on a paywall for SellDom.io
I'm working on this project, SellDom.io where anyone can submit the unused domain and anyone else can make offers.
I've thought long and large on how to earn money with this service, and here's what I came to: 1. Manage the sale completely, act like an escrow. I would get the money from the buyer, and wait until the transfer has been successful to release the funds to the seller. This is interesting, but there is too much issue with it. I'm screwed in case of chargeback, and in legal and accounting terms, it's just hell.
2. Ask the seller to pay up-front. This is not good as I want to have a maximum of domains on sale on SellDom. Putting a paywall upfront would be against it.
3. Ask the buyer to pay to submit an offer. I'm not for asking the buyer to pay something again. He will already have to pay for getting the domain + transferring it to the registrar. Moreover, (s)he is not responsible for using SellDom.
4. Ask the seller to pay to access the buyer's offers. This is the best solution I came up so far.
So here I am. I have implemented a paywall that asks the sellers to pay 20$ (fixed fee, not a percent of the domain price) to get access to the offer's information.
The reason I decided to ask for 20$ and not a percent fee is that I don't want to make tons of money on it, just get a few to pay the servers and make a bit of a living out of it, that's all. Moreover, I believe that the higher the price will be, the more chance the seller will pay to get the offers.
What do you think? If you own some unused domain, would you use SellDom or would this information be a huge downer? Do you think of an alternative idea I didn't think of?
The project is recent, I released it today, so I can make an 180° change without any problems!
Any feedback in appreciated :)