What if we slashed their prices?
Seems like a business decision for Flippa.
Are you guys not getting enough people opting in for upgrades?
Obviously in the long run I'd like to think Flippa's primary focus is to make the majority of its revenues from commissions, otherwise it will mean that sellers aren't getting results on your platform, and that's not sustainable for a market place.
What might be nice is if you could reduce you upgrade pricing for sellers to promote their domain to a smaller, but more targeted, audience.
Ie, if I was selling a finance domain, I'd be more interested in having an email sent to 3,000 email subscribers that have opted into receiving notifications about "finance" domains at a reasonable rate than paying full price to blast your whole 150,000 email database.
The same goes for location, a lot of domains are specific to locations - if you're selling a .co.uk domain I'd rather the marketing from an upgrade focus on targeting the 5% of the Flippa user base that are UK based.
What if we got rid of them outright?
I think rather than removing them, I feel you just want to be sure that upgrades don't undermine the buyer's user experience of your site or being on your email lists because without those eyeballs it's going to be hard to achieve good results for sellers (which is all sellers really care about).
No one likes being distracted by junk be it on websites they visit or in their inbox.
And I'd rather 10 people that are very interested in my domain and highly motivated to be notified about it being on Flippa than it be shoved in front of 10,000 people who aren't interested and annoyed that their attention was stolen.
My biggest pet peeve is the logos and the font size changes in the listings, because it makes the domain listings much less scanable.
I feel an upgrades only job is to draw attention to a listing, an upgrade in itself isn't going to close the deal (the quality of the domain itself and communication with bidders determines that) so grabbing attention beyond a certain point doesn't increase the quality of the sale.
So for me a simple bolding of a domain listing is more than enough to draw my attention, even if it doesn't change my propensity to bid on a domain.
What if a seller had to apply to receive an upgrade
I feel if upgrades didn't offer a logo or font size (other than bolding) they wouldn't be as bothersome and it wouldn't be an issue and it would save Flippa the administrative headache.
What if we limited the number of auctions?
I think the more "genuine auctions" the better for the platform (ie sellers who are eager to "meet the market" of buyers who can commercially utilise the domain).
As long as people browsing the listings have the ability to effectively filter them.
At the end of the day, to build a good marketplace you want to maximizing both the number and value of the sales, and I don't think reducing the number of auctions would improve either of those metrics.
So as long as sellers are encourage to set BINs and reserves that do not waste buyers time, and Flippa is doing its best to ensure its bringing the buyers to its marketplace, I think it's fine.
Maybe offering sellers some incentives to "meet the market" might help?
I don't really have any solutions (just spit-balling) but maybe something like offering sellers a 50% discount on the success fee if they accept a bid that is below reserve in the post auction negotiation would help get more deals across the line?
Maybe offering a 5% success fee for no-reserve auctions?
Maybe offering a lower 7% success fee for seller who sell their domain on the first time they list the domain (and pushing it up to 10% if they relist)?
I also agree that there should be some limits around relisting.
I'll post some other suggestions in individual posts below: