Earlier this week I received an email from a blog reader, she said she’s new to domain investing and wanted to list some of her domains for sale on a marketplace but didn’t know the differences between BrandBucket and Squadhelp. I responded letting her know that I’m far from being an expert when it comes to either of these marketplaces but that it’s probably a good question for my blog readers, hence this post.
At a high level I can share a few differences between the two marketplaces and then I’m hoping readers that have used either or both can share more about their own experiences. Also just to be clear, neither BrandBucket or Squadhelp is a sponsor of this blog so I’m not going to make a penny if you decide to you one or the other, or neither!
Okay so let’s dive in and talk about the little that I do know about these marketplaces. For me the core differences for Domainers has to do with a few key factors:
- How long it takes for domains to be approved and added to the marketplaces
- Number of eyeballs that marketplaces sends to your domains
- Commission you owe if a domain sells
Let’s start with #1, how long it takes for domains to be approved on each marketplace. This is one thing I do know a little bit about, BrandBucket takes a month or longer, Squadhelp is quite a bit faster and you can get names approved in a matter of days. I’m not sure if it matters that much how quickly your names get on a marketplace since domain sales is a bit of a long game so an extra month probably isn’t going to hurt you too much.
That being said, I do think BrandBucket can be a bit pickier about which names make the cut which means you could wait a month or longer just to find out none of your names quality. Squadhelp is faster and does let more names in which could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. All that being said, I don’t think there’s a clear winner here where you could say one does it better than another, there’s a balance and both has a little different approach.
Onto #2, the number of eyeballs you’ll get. This one I really don’t know the answer to but I decided to pop over to Alexa to see what they say, and here’s the comparison:
BrandBucket
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SquadHelp
As you may or may not know, when it comes to Alexa, anything under 100,000 is pretty darn good, under 25,000 is great and under 10,000 is stellar. Both sites have a sub-10,000 Alexa rank so they’re both doing pretty darn good. Once again, probably nothing conclusive here to drive you in one direction or the other, both sites have low Alexa ranks and likely see quite a bit of traffic. In the US specifically they have almost the exact same Alexa rank so if you’re looking at US traffic they likely have very similar traffic metrics.
Now last but not least, the all important question – commission. BrandBucket charges commission on a sliding scale, see below:
30% for names below $10,000 USD
25% for names between $10,000 USD and $50,000 USD
20% for names between $50,000 USD and $100,000 USD
15% for names above $100,000 USD
Squadhelp also follows a sliding scale with a 5% higher commission for seller owned names below $2,499:
Overall it seems like if you’re selling domains in the $75k – $100k range you’ll save 5% in commission with Squadhelp, but domains in the sub $2,500 range will save 5% commission with BrandBucket, outside of that the commission plans are relatively similar.
After the light analysis I did here I don’t see anything that should sway someone in one direction or the other, they both seem pretty comparable when it comes to traffic and commission and while waiting longer to get a name approved on BrandBucket might but some people, like I said above, I think that’s a non-issue esp when you balance it with what is probably a bit more rigorous approval criteria.
So now let’s get to the useful stuff since everything I provided you might be helpful info to have, but might not aid you too much in picking one vs. another. This is where you my reader come in – which marketplace do you prefer and why? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!
