Every confirmed offer on Nameshift now comes with a buyer tab: the buyer's track record across the marketplace, the company behind their email address, where their connection is, and what they looked at before making the offer. Here is what each part shows, and how far to trust it.
The problem it solves
An offer arrives as a name, an email address and a number. Whether $8,000 is a serious opening bid or a try-on, and whether to counter at $9,000 or $14,000, used to be a guess from the email domain and the tone of the message. Most sellers we talk to either countered high on everything or accepted too early on the offers that mattered, and it was hard to tell afterwards which had happened.
The buyer tab puts what Nameshift can find out about the buyer next to the offer, so the counter is a judgement about a person rather than about an address. It is not a credit check, and some of it is blank for some buyers; the sections below say what to expect from each part.
What is on the buyer tab
Track record
Three labels, worked out from every lead this buyer has had on Nameshift, with any seller: how many domains they have bought (none, one to three, or four and up), what share of their offers reached an accepted deal, and what share of those were actually paid. A buyer with four purchases and a 100% payment rate is a different conversation from one with six open leads and nothing closed. With fewer than four leads the tab says so and marks the figures as limited data; treat a first-time buyer's labels as unknown rather than bad.
Who the buyer is
For an offer from a company address, the tab shows what the public record says about the company behind that domain: legal and trading name, country, industry, employee and revenue range, founding year, and the registry or VAT number where one exists. Where a web search turns up something that ties the person or the company to your domain, it is summarised in two or three sentences with the sources linked, so you can check it yourself. This part is often empty, and it is always empty for free-mail addresses, because there is no company behind gmail.com to look up.
Where they are
The country of the buyer's IP address is always shown; the city and a map appear when the data is good enough, and the tab flags an address that belongs to a VPN, Tor, a hosting provider or a mobile network, since a location means little in those cases. Generally speaking, a buyer whose connection sits in the same country as their company is what you expect to see; a mismatch is a question to ask, not a verdict.
What they did on your domain
Page views on the sale page, how many pages they opened, the amounts they typed into the offer box before sending one (whether or not they sent them), and which other domains on Nameshift they looked at. The typed amounts are the closest thing to a negotiating range the tab gives you: a buyer who typed $12,000, deleted it and sent $8,000 has told you something.
A worked example
Say an $8,000 offer comes in on a .com. The track record shows four domains bought and every deal paid. The company behind the email is a software firm of around forty people, founded in 2015, in Germany; the IP address is in Germany too. The activity shows seven page views and two amounts typed before the offer, $6,000 and then $8,000, and two sibling extensions of your domain on the same nameservers as the buyer's own site, which the tab labels a hint, not proof.
None of that proves what the domain is worth to them. Together it says this is a buyer who pays, who has looked more than once, and whose company plausibly has a use for the name. Countering at $12,000 and settling around $10,500 is a reasonable read of that; accepting $8,000 on the first message probably is not. Without the tab, the same offer looks like every other $8,000 offer.
What it does not do
- It does not look up which domains a buyer owns. The only ownership signal is the nameserver match on sibling extensions of your own domain, and shared hosting makes that a hint at best.
- It does not show a buyer's bids or counteroffers on other sellers' domains. Across domains you get the three track-record labels and nothing more detailed.
- It does not verify the name or company the buyer typed into the offer form; the company data comes from the email domain, not from the form.
- The buyer's full email address is shown only to sellers with 500 or more domains pointing to Nameshift; everyone else sees the domain part.
What to do now
Open any confirmed offer in your seller account and look for the buyer tab beside the offer history. Read the track record first, then the activity, then the company; that is the order of how much each one tends to change the counter. And since the counter also depends on what the sale costs you, the commission rates are in their own post.
