It’s no secret that Sedo sells a lot of domains. They also have some of the best brokers out there with proven track records for selling names like it’s going out of style. On top of that, they have been rolling out UI updates to improve the look-and-feel of the site…but unfortunately, like I said in the title of this post – the backend still seems to be stuck in the past.
When I started buying and selling domain names back in 2007 I remember Sedo having some issues with their backend, but I thought, okay – over time they’ll fix it. Now I’m pretty surprised to see that a number of these issues are still there and haven’t changed a bit in the last ten years.
Here’s an example. Let’s suppose you want to delete all the domains in your account. These domain names will still show up but instead are listed as Not for sale. In the end, your Sedo account will look something like this after you have deleted domains from your portfolio:
Now I know, these are not listed for sale so that might be the same as deleting a domain…but I think it’s probably pretty darn confusing to your average user as it was for me ten years ago. Every other platform I’ve used removes the domains so you don’t see them in your portfolio after deleting them so it looks like this is a legacy feature that Sedo is hanging on to.
Sedo has also had the notion of SedoMLS Premium but they don’t list on their site which registrars are supported so you have to first upload domains and then see if your registrar is supported. Seems like it would be easy enough to just publish a list of supported registrars right?
Last but not least, the “Offers Received” section of the site still looks just like it did back in 2007 and is just as clunky. Given that this is where such a critical part of the domain sales process takes place you’d think this would be ripe for innovation over a ten year time period. There are a lot of ways Sedo could upgrade this to make it easier for sellers to follow-up with and negotiate deals with buyers.
At the same time, I’ve always wondered if Sedo tries to keep their DIY selling tools limited to give an advantage to their domain brokers. Either way, as a seller I would love to see improvements made to these core parts of the site every couple of years.
So why the rant on a Monday morning? I just look at services like Uniregistry and can so clearly see what is possible from a domain listing service, here’s their backend:
Seriously, you can tell the amount of time and thought that went into building the Uniregistry backend, it’s clean, intuitive, and gives sellers a lot more power to negotiate their own deals. Sedo has been around a lot longer than Uniregistry, so how did they let their backend slip so far behind?
What do you think? Am I expecting too much here or did Sedo just put some paint on a backend system that is long overdue for an update?
You’ve heard what I have to say, now I want to hear from you. Comment and let your voice be heard!
