How a domain purchase actually works, start to finish

Most people buy a premium domain once or twice in a career, against a counterparty who has done it fifty times. The asymmetry is not in negotiation skill; it is in knowing the sequence. Here it is.

1. Enquiry

You contact the holder or respond to a listing. Keep the first message short and unemotional. Do not explain that you have already designed the logo, raised the round, or built the product — every detail about how much you need the name is information the other side will price.

Ask two things: is it available, and what are they looking for.

2. Verification

Before discussing money, establish that the person can sell. Are they the registrant of record? Is the name unlocked and outside any restricted transfer window? Is the registrant entity still in existence?

This stage is skipped constantly and is the cause of most collapsed purchases. It costs one email.

3. Due diligence

History, indexing, blocklists, inbound links, trademark collisions, and for a Vietnamese name, a native reading of the string. Under an hour of work, almost all of it free.

Do this before you negotiate, not after you agree. Findings here change the price; findings after agreement just make you look like you are retrading.

4. Negotiation

Know your ceiling before you start and do not move it because the conversation is going well. Ask what the seller's reasoning is; a price with an argument behind it is a different negotiation from a price without one.

Expect silence between messages. Domain negotiations move in days, not hours, and treating a pause as a signal usually leads to bidding against yourself.

5. Agreement

Write down what is being sold, for how much, in what currency, through which mechanism, by when, and who pays the transfer and escrow costs. This does not need to be elaborate, but it needs to exist.

Ambiguity here is where otherwise complete deals fall apart, usually over the fee nobody mentioned.

6. Escrow and transfer

Funds to a neutral holder, then the transfer executes, then funds release. For a generic extension this is an account push or a transfer with an authorisation code, often same-day. For a country-code name it is a documented change of registrant taking several working days.

Propose escrow at the start. Introducing it after terms are agreed reads as distrust and has killed deals that were otherwise done.

7. Handover

Confirm the registrant record shows your details exactly as you want them long term. Set the renewal on a payment method that will still exist next year. Enable registrar lock. Note the expiry somewhere that is not just the registrar's email.

Only then change nameservers and move the site. Moving hosting before ownership settles means an outage sitting on top of a dispute if anything goes wrong.

Realistic timing

A generic extension with a cooperative seller: a few days end to end. A country-code name with clean documentation: one to two weeks. Anything with a complication — absent registrant, dissolved company, mismatched documents — several weeks.

Plan against the pessimistic figure. A launch date that assumes the optimistic one is a launch date that slips.