Negotiate not haggle

A few days back I received a simple query through NameDrive on one of my parked generic domains. "Are you interested in selling this domain name? If so can you please contact me" with an isp email address. That's not a lot of information & email is fairly inscrutable so I didn't have a clue why this person might me interested in the domain in question, and I knew I'd be negotiating blind.

There's a lot of people out there who believe I should sell my generics for nothing and unless there's some reason why the person really wants that specific domain name, queries as simple this come to nothing when I quote a realistic starting price, so I simply sent back a quick one-liner "Yes, I would be prepared to sell it, I'd want NZ$ 500 though." and didn't think any more about it.

Two days later he replied by email "Would you [accept] $300.00."

Normally I'd haggle on the price and would probably have settled for around $400, but I just felt like I'd like a little more.

My reply:

Advertising on the parked domain brought in US$ 80.79 during the year 01/10/06 to 30/09/07. Using 3 years revenue as a yardstick that means that the domain has a revenue producing value of NZ$ 311.42 without any further changes.

Using what I've learned since parking the domain I'm sure I could increase that relatively easily, especially as it was only making US$ 0.09 per click. A 2 minute search shows affiliate possibilities through thesurfshop, godo, and easybed that should easily outstrip that and there's probably a lot more out there.

I think I'd prefer to hang onto it rather than accept any less than $500.

Just over 20 minutes later, the sale was agreed, at my asking price.

Given that the revenue records are all stored at NameDrive, it only took me 5 minutes to research and write two short paragraphs that increased the price $100 over what I would normally have accepted.

The lesson for me is that if I can justify the price to myself, it shouldn't be too hard to justify to a purchaser.