Domain ownership transfer

di11on

I run an ecommerce website for my sister who is based in the UK. She has a .com domain name.

A guy has emailed her saying he's the owner of the .co.uk equivalent, has no more use for it and only wants £10 for it. She is interested in it and he sounds genuine, but what is best, safest way of doing the transaction?

How does someone actually transfer to you their domain name? Is there a transfer of ownership procedure you can go through with the registrar, or do you simply have to wait for it to expire?

Thanks,

Di11on

di11on

Anyone?

axer

Check out escrow.com. I have never used them though.

Edit: then again it is only 10 pounds so the other guy can do it through his registrar. I'm sure he can just change the contact/registered owner names and then let your sister take over from then to change nameservers etc.

mneylon

Sorry. I would have replied earlier, but was caught up with something in work

Nominet has a transfer ownership process which cost about £20Stg if you do it direct, or a bit more if a registrar assists you.

Basically the current owner signs over the domain to the new owner. It's not complicated - simply filling out a couple of forms

£10 is incredibly cheap, so the potential loss is minimal if the transaction goes south. However, if you want peace of mind, you could use a 3rd party to handle the transaction for you such as escrow.com
There are several companies that specialise in this sort of domain transaction, but the fees would be higher than the transaction value, so I doubt if they'd be of interest

HTH

Michele

mneylon

axer wrote: »

Edit: then again it is only 10 pounds so the other guy can do it through his registrar. I'm sure he can just change the contact/registered owner names and then let your sister take over from then to change nameservers etc.

Unfortunately the Nominet system doesn't allow a registrant change to be made by the registrar. It has to be processed manually by Nominet staff.

Hopefully they'll change this process at some stage, but I wouldn't hold my breath

CoNfOuNd

di11on wrote: »

How does someone actually transfer to you their domain name? Is there a transfer of ownership procedure you can go through with the registrar, or do you simply have to wait for it to expire?

I think in this case you aren't looking for a 3rd party to handle the transfer. I would just transfer the domain to your preferred registrar(nominet tag holder) and change the whois contact details on the domain to your own. You certainly don't have to wait for it to expire.

There is information on the nominet transfer procedure at:

http://www.nominet.org.uk/registrants/maintain/transfer/

Also, I've always found Nominet Registrant Services are very helpful when you call them.

di11on

Thanks for all the replies.

Sure, £10 isn't much, but feeling like a sucker is worse!