Ask three appraisal tools what your domain is worth and you will get three numbers, sometimes an order of magnitude apart. That is not because the tools are broken — it is because “worth” is not a property of a domain. It is a property of a transaction: this buyer, this seller, this moment. Pricing a domain well means estimating what a realistic transaction looks like, and there is a repeatable method for that.
Step 1: Decide Which Market You Are Pricing For
Domains trade in two very different markets. The wholesale market is investors selling to investors — fast, liquid, and cheap, typically 10–20% of retail. The retail market is selling to an end user who wants this specific name for their business — slow, illiquid, and where the real prices live. The single most common pricing mistake is quoting a retail price when you need a wholesale exit, or accepting a wholesale offer for a name with genuine end-user demand. Before anything else, decide: can you afford to wait years for the right buyer? Your answer determines which comps matter.
Step 2: Pull Comparable Sales
Comps are the backbone of every serious valuation. Search a sales-history database for names matching yours on four dimensions, in priority order: extension (.com comps for .com domains — cross-extension comparisons mislead badly), structure (one-word versus two-word, character count), category (a pet-niche comp prices a pet domain better than a finance comp of identical length), and recency (inside hype cycles like AI, comps older than a year are stale). Five good comps beat fifty loose ones. Note whether each comp came from an auction — which skews wholesale — or a marketplace buy-it-now, which reflects retail.
Step 3: Adjust for the Factors Comps Miss
With a comp cluster in hand, adjust for what makes your name different. Upward: your name is the singular/cleaner version, has an active trademark-free commercial category, gets type-in traffic, or the category is newly hot. Downward: hyphens or digits, ambiguous spelling (“their/there” problems kill radio-test value), a plural where the singular exists, or the category peaked two years ago. Be brutal on the downward adjustments — sellers systematically overweight their name’s strengths because they chose it.
Step 4: Set Ask, Floor, and Walk-Away Behavior
Retail sellers should list at roughly 2–4× the comp midpoint. End users anchor against your ask and negotiate down; you cannot negotiate up from a low anchor. Privately, set a floor — the number below which you renew for another year instead of selling. When an offer arrives, respond with data, not adjectives: two or three specific comps justify a counter far better than “premium one-of-a-kind name.” If a buyer opens at $200 on a five-figure name, they are price-discovering, not insulting you; a polite counter with comps converts a surprising share of lowballers into real negotiations.
Step 5: Sanity-Check the Whole Thing
Finally, invert the question: who exactly buys this name, and what is it worth to them? A name that saves a funded startup from a compound brand is worth months of marketing budget. A name whose only plausible buyer is another investor is worth wholesale, whatever the appraisal tools say. If you cannot describe the end buyer in one sentence, price for wholesale and be pleasantly surprised.
One last calibration: across large portfolios, roughly 1–3% of names sell in a given year. Pricing is not just per-name arithmetic — it is portfolio math. A single retail sale at a strong price routinely pays for years of renewals across dozens of names that never sell. That is the business model, and it only works when the names you hold are ones an end user might genuinely want.