Where to sell a domain name: Sedo, Afternic, Atom and escrow (2026)

The short version

• To sell a domain name on its own, list it on a domain marketplace, not a website marketplace. This page covers three open ones: Sedo, Afternic and Atom.
• Commissions run from 7.5% (Atom Standard) to 30% (Afternic Boost and Atom Premium under $5,000).
• Dan.com is gone. GoDaddy bought it in July 2022, and it retired on June 27, 2025, with its features folded into Afternic.
• Get paid through escrow or the marketplace’s own transfer service, and check for trademark problems before you list.

The marketplaces side by side

What you keep on a $5,000 sale

The math is the rate times $5,000. The rate depends on how and where the name sells, so the same domain can cost you $375 or $1,500 to sell. Holding the name while you wait has a cost too: our site-wide baseline for keeping a .com for three years is $48.24 in renewals.

Sedo

Sedo is a domain-only marketplace. Its price list sets the seller commission by how the name sells: 10% for Buy Now with parking or a Sedo sales landing page; 15% for Make Offer, auctions, or Buy Now without parking; 20% for sales through the SedoMLS partner network.

• Minimums. Category I extensions, including .com and .io, have no minimum fee and a minimum sale price of 20 USD. Category II extensions have a minimum fee of 200 USD and a minimum price of 220.
• Extras. A basic listing has no fee listed. A Direct Auction costs $59 to set up (“Push to Auction” after an offer is free). Domain Showcase is $39 for 30 days, Category Showcase $9, and an appraisal $99.
• Broker service. 15% on success with no upfront cost to the seller; buyers pay a $69 one-time fee plus 15%.
• Transfer service. Sedo’s own escrow-style transfer costs 3% of the gross sale price (minimum 60 USD for Category I), with 3% more for express processing on some payment methods.

Fees exclude VAT, and the price list shows no effective date.

Afternic

Afternic is GoDaddy’s domain marketplace network. According to Afternic’s sell page, Buy It Now sales cost 25% on Basic or 30% on Boost, falling to 15% or 20% when the domain’s nameservers point to GoDaddy. There is a “$15 minimum commission fee with all sales”. Lease to Own sales get “commission discounts up to 15% based on term length”.

The page doesn’t list a listing fee, a Make Offer rate or payout timing. Pointing nameservers to GoDaddy changes your DNS, so don’t do it on a domain that runs a live website or email.

Atom

Atom.com, formerly Squadhelp, has three seller tiers on its sell page:

• Standard: “7.5% Commission on All Domains”, free listing, “List Anywhere (No Exclusivity)”.
• Plus: “15% Commission on All Domains”, no approval needed.
• Premium: 30% below $4,999, 25% from $5,000 to $49,999, 20% from $50K to $74,999 and 15% above $75K. It needs approval (“Our experts accept < 10% of domains”) and a listing costs one Atom Coin ($1).

Premium is partly exclusive. Atom’s policy article (updated October 23, 2026) lets you list a Premium name elsewhere only as Buy It Now, on approved platforms, at a price “at least 10% higher than your Atom BIN price”. Trade site Domain Name Wire reported in August 2025 that these domains also have to point to Atom’s nameservers; that detail is not on Atom’s own page.

For sales to your own leads, AtomPay charges “1.35% – 4.5% Commission” and is described as “Secure Payment and Domain Holding”. The page doesn’t call it escrow.

GoDaddy and the end of Dan.com

Dan.com was a domain marketplace known for lease-to-own sales. GoDaddy’s FY2022 Form 10-K says: “in July 2022, we acquired Dan.com”. Dan.com later announced it was closing to new sign-ups and opened “a four-week period” for sellers to move listings to Afternic; listings of sellers who opted out were deleted. Dan.com’s page doesn’t give a date. Trade site Domain Name Wire dated the announcement September 12, 2024 and reported that existing lease-to-own deals would move to Afternic that November.

Dan.com’s farewell post (June 18, 2025) said the platform would “officially retire on June 27, 2025”, with Lease to Own and its other features moving to Afternic. If you still have old Dan.com links in listings or emails, replace them. For GoDaddy as a registrar, see our GoDaddy registrar page.

Escrow and getting the name to the buyer

A domain sale has two halves: the money and the name. Escrow keeps them in step. Escrow.com’s fee calculator covers domain names in the same schedule as other items: 2.6% up to $5,000 (minimum $50), so $130 on a $5,000 sale, and 2.4% from $5,000.01 to $50,000. Buyer and seller agree who pays. Sedo’s 3% transfer service does the same job for Sedo sales.

Moving the name works one of two ways:

• Account push, when buyer and seller use the same registrar. At Namecheap, “Change Ownership” is free, has no 60-day wait, keeps the DNS settings so nothing goes down, and can’t be undone. The buyer has 7 days to accept. Namecheap won’t push an expired domain or one listed on its marketplace until you renew it or remove the listing.
• Registrar transfer, when they use different registrars. See how to transfer a domain.

Only push or transfer after the escrow service confirms the buyer’s money is in.

The domain is also the part of a website you can always take with you. On our exit scores, most builders get full marks for letting you transfer the domain out, even when the site itself stays behind. That is why a good name can be sold on its own after a site is shut down.

Trademark risks

This is general information, not legal advice. Selling a name that matches someone else’s brand is where domain sales go wrong.

Under the US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (15 U.S.C. 1125(d)), you can be liable to a mark owner if you register, traffic in or use a domain identical or confusingly similar to a distinctive mark with “a bad faith intent to profit from that mark”. One sign of bad faith is offering to sell the domain to the mark owner or anyone else for profit without ever using it, or meaning to use it, for a real business. Courts can order the domain transferred, and statutory damages run “not less than $1,000 and not more than $100,000 per domain name”.

ICANN’s UDRP is the faster route mark owners use. They must prove the name is identical or confusingly similar to their mark, that you have no rights or legitimate interest in it, and that it was registered and used in bad faith, for example bought mainly to sell to the mark owner or a competitor for more than your out-of-pocket costs. The only remedies are cancellation or transfer, with no money damages.

Before you list, search the name against registered trademarks, and leave out any sales pitch aimed at a specific brand.

What to do next

• New to how domains work? Start with domains 101.
• Selling the whole site, not just the name? Read how to sell a website and the buy and sell websites hub.
• Comparing where to keep the domains you hold: Namecheap and the other registrars we cover.