Now, sellers have complete flexibility on what types of payment plans to offer on their domains. As a seller, you can now setup rules for following:
Choose the max payment plan term (e.g. 12 months, 24 months, 36 months) based on selling price
Choose whether or not to require a downpayment on payment plans of 12 months of higher.
Specify your own % downpayment that you would like to collect on your domains.
In our experience, offer longer payment plans can increase the expected sell-through rates on the domains. However, long payment plans without an upfront downpayment typically result in lower NET monthly payouts to sellers. They can also lead to a higher cancellation rate since the buyers are not as committed to the purchase.
By requiring an upfront downpayment, you can not only mitigate the cancellation risk, you can also ensure that you have received a higher upfront payout even if the buyer chooses a longer payment plan.
Here is how it works:
Go to Settings/ Marketplace Settings
Under Custom Settings, go to Payment & Selling Tools
Choose the max payment plan to offer based on the selling price (for example, for domains priced below $2000, you may offer a max term of 12 months, while for domains above $10,000, you can choose to offer a longer term of 36 months)
4. Select whether or not you would like to collect a downpayment on domains with payment plans of 12 months or higher. You can choose a custom percent amount based on the selling price, or you can let SH automatically calculate the most appropriate downpayment.
Overriding Payment Plan Settings For Individual Domains
While the above rules apply to your entire portfolio, you can also override these settings for some of your domains by changing them directly from your Marketplace Listings page.
This can be helpful during negotiations where you may agree to offer a custom downpayment and max term for specific domains.
Automatic Surcharge
Atom automatically adds a surcharge on payment plans of 12 months or higher. The buyer is responsible for this surcharge and the surcharge is split between seller and SH. For Seller owned domains, SH keeps 35% of the surcharge amount, and seller receives 65% of the surcharge amount. Here are the rules of how much surcharge is collected,
For payment plans of 12 months, buyer pays 10% surcharge
For payment plans of 24 months, buyer pays 15% surcharge
For payment plans of 36 months, buyer pays 20% surcharge
For payment plans of 48 months, buyer pays 25% surcharge.
For example, if you sell a domain priced at $7200 with a 36 month plan, the buyer's base monthly payment will be $200 per month, and a monthly surcharge of $40 per month.
When the domain is fully paid off, At 25% commission, the seller would have received a total of $5400 NET from the base payment and $936 NET from the surcharge payment. With a total of $6336 NET payment, the seller would have paid an effective commission rate of 12% instead of 25%.