Someone Wants to Buy My Domain Name: What It Is Worth and How to Sell It

An email arrives offering money for a domain you own. Maybe it is a name you registered years ago for a project that never launched, maybe it is the one your business actually runs on. Either way you now have a decision with real money attached and no obvious way to check whether the number is fair.

The short version: do not reply with a price, do not pay anyone a fee, and find out what the name is actually worth before you negotiate. Most of the mistakes here happen in the first hour.

First, work out whether the offer is even real

A large share of unsolicited domain offers are not offers at all. The best documented version is the appraisal scam, and it has been running long enough that Namecheap, Tiger Technologies and Wikipedia's own article on domain name scams all describe the same script.

It works like this. Someone offers an eye catching sum for your domain, often five figures. When you show interest they explain that before they can proceed they need the name formally appraised or certified, to protect themselves against overpaying or against a trademark problem. They point you at a specific appraisal service, usually one you have never heard of, which charges somewhere around $79 to a few hundred dollars. You pay it. The buyer stops replying.

The appraisal service is generally connected to the person who made the offer. The fee was the entire point of the exercise, and the domain was never going to be bought.

Two rules kill this cleanly. A real buyer never insists you use one particular appraisal service. And a real buyer never asks the seller to pay a fee to make the sale happen, because in a genuine transaction the money moves toward you.

Some other tells worth knowing:

• The offer is far above what the name could plausibly be worth, with no attempt to negotiate. Real buyers negotiate. It is the single most reliable signal.
• The sender is vague about who they are or what they want the name for, or the company they claim to represent has no trace anywhere.
• There is urgency attached to a purchase that has no reason to be urgent.
• You are asked to move to a payment method with no reversal, or to a service that is not a recognized escrow provider.

None of this means every inbound offer is fraud. Plenty are genuine, particularly when they come from a named person at an identifiable company, or through a broker acting for an undisclosed client. It means the first move is verification rather than negotiation.

Second, find out what your domain is actually worth

This is where most sellers lose money, and they lose it in both directions. Some name a number in the low hundreds for something worth far more, because they are anchored to the $12 they pay to renew it. Others read about a seven figure sale and refuse anything less, then hold a name nobody else ever asks about.

The only useful evidence is what comparable names have actually sold for. Not what similar names are listed at, because asking prices are what optimistic owners hope for. Sold prices are what buyers really paid.

Length, extension and word type are what drive it. A short one word .com is a different asset from a three word .net, and the sales record for each is public enough to work from. You can price a name against real domain sales history and get a working range in a couple of minutes, free, and without paying anybody a certification fee. If someone has told you an appraisal must be purchased before a sale can proceed, that alone tells you what you are dealing with.

One important distinction while you are valuing it. If the domain has a live site on it with traffic, customers or revenue, you are not selling a domain at all, you are selling a business, and it should be valued as one on earnings rather than on the string. The two produce wildly different numbers, and people who value the whole operation properly before answering an inbound approach tend to discover the domain was the least valuable part of what was being asked for.

Third, understand who is buying, because it sets the price

The same domain has more than one correct price, and which one applies depends entirely on who sent the email.

An investor or reseller is buying to sell it on later. They have to leave margin in the deal, so their ceiling is well below what the name is ultimately worth. They tend to open low, move slowly, and walk away easily, because they have hundreds of other names to consider.

An end user is buying because they need that exact name. Perhaps they have picked a brand, funded a launch, or spent months getting internal agreement on a product name. For them the domain solves a problem that is worth more than the domain, and their ceiling can be many multiples of the investor price.

You can often tell which one you are dealing with from the email itself. Investors write short, transactional messages and frequently make an opening offer immediately. End users ask questions, mention what they want to use it for, and sometimes give away that a deadline exists. A broker approaching on behalf of an undisclosed client is usually working for an end user, which is precisely why the client stays undisclosed.

This matters because the identity of the buyer, not the quality of the name, is often the biggest single factor in the final price. Our page on domain buyers and what each type will pay goes through the categories in more detail.

Fourth, do not name the first number

When you reply with a price, you have set the ceiling. Nothing that happens afterwards goes above it. When they name a price, you have learned something about their budget and given up nothing.

So the useful reply to "how much do you want for it?" is some version of "make me an offer and I will consider it seriously." If they refuse to go first, a wide range is better than a single figure, and it should be anchored to the comparable sales you looked up rather than to a feeling.

Two practical points. Do not mention that the domain is unused, that you forgot you owned it, or that you were about to let it expire, all of which are common and all of which cost money. And if the name is genuinely valuable, at five figures or above, a broker who negotiates domain sales for a living will usually recover their commission and more, though on smaller sales the commission makes it not worth it.

Fifth, close it so that nobody has to move first

The structural problem in a private domain sale is that neither side wants to go first. You do not want to transfer a domain to someone who then does not pay. They do not want to send money to a stranger who then keeps both.

Escrow solves it by holding the funds while the domain moves, and releasing them only once the transfer is confirmed. On Escrow.com the current schedule is tiered: a sale up to $5,000 is charged at 2.6 percent with a $50 minimum, and a sale between $5,000 and $50,000 at 2.4 percent with a $130 minimum. Card and PayPal payments under $5,000 add a 3.05 percent processing surcharge on top.

Worth knowing, because a great many articles have not updated: the 0.89 percent domain rate that still gets quoted everywhere was retired when the tiered schedule took effect on 31 May 2024. If you have budgeted on 0.89 percent, budget again.

Who pays the escrow fee is negotiable and is usually either split or absorbed by the buyer. It is a small enough line item that it is not worth losing a deal over, and it is the cheapest insurance in the entire transaction. Our page on domain escrow covers the full schedule and the sequence of steps.

Two more things belong in the close. Put the terms in writing, including the price, what is being transferred and by when, which is what a domain assignment agreement is for. And know that if the domain was registered, transferred or had its registrant details changed in the last 60 days, an ICANN lock may prevent an immediate transfer between registrars. If both parties happen to be at the same registrar, an account to account push avoids that entirely and is normally instant and free.

If you decide not to sell

Declining is a legitimate answer, and it is the right one more often than the volume of offers suggests. If the domain is the address of a business you are actually running, selling it means rebuilding recognition, redirecting links and changing every email address you have, and the offer would need to be very large indeed to cover that.

If you do decline, decline plainly rather than inventing an unrealistic price to scare them off. Buyers keep records. A name you priced at $200,000 to make somebody go away is a name you have made awkward to sell for a realistic figure in two years' time.

A short checklist

1. Do not reply with a price in the first exchange.
2. Check who the buyer is and whether the company exists.
3. Never pay a fee, and never pay for an appraisal the buyer told you to buy.
4. Price the name against comparable sold domains before responding.
5. Decide whether you are selling a domain or a business, and value accordingly.
6. Let them make the first offer.
7. Settle through escrow, on the current tiered rates.
8. Put the terms in writing and check for a 60 day transfer lock.

The offer in your inbox may be worth taking. It may also be worth several times what has been put on the table, or be nothing at all. Those three cases look identical in the first email, and the only way to tell them apart is to price the name yourself before you answer. Start with what names like yours have actually sold for, then reply.