Why it’s hard to know, who will sell you their number?

It's hard to know who will sell you their toll free number.
If you looked at a list of homes there’s no way to know just by looking at them who would be interested in or willing to sell you their home if you negotiated for it. But people are used to buying and selling their homes and they know roughly what their home is worth and whether they might have thought about moving. It’s also not too hard to tell who makes the decision most of the time and even if you can’t reach them at the home, you can look up who owns a piece of property in the town if necessary.

If you looked at a group of attractive girls there’s no way to know just by looking at them who would be interested or willing to go to the prom with you if you approached them properly. But girls would have thought about the prom a lot and they would know what you were talking about, and whether or not they were still available or not. It’s also very easy to know who makes the decision because you’re looking at her.

When you look at a list of phone numbers that someone gave you not only is there no way to know by looking at them who would be willing to sell you their number if you negotiated with them, but they have probably never thought about selling their phone number, they wouldn’t know how much it was worth, how to do it, or whether they could get another number or not. And on top of that it’s very hard to know who makes the decision in many cases.

Add to the mix, that there’s no whois lookup or town hall you can go to look up who owns the number. Even in a medium sized company it’s also very hard to find out who is responsible for that and to get them to make a decision. That’s why it’s so much harder than people would realize or appreciate to answer the question, “Is it possible to buy that number or any of these numbers?”

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    7 Comments »

    James says:
    September 6, 2008 at 12:33 am

    There needs to be a Phone Number Market. A place where people can go to sell or purchase a phone number. I suppose life is hard until someone makes it easier…

      Bill Quimby (291 comments.) says:
      September 6, 2008 at 6:39 pm

      Even if there was, it wouldn’t make it any easier to see which numbers where available off the typical wish list, because most numbers wouldn’t be listed there even if there was a popular site for that.

      Take the MLS for example. That’s certainly a very thorough list of available homes, but that doesn’t make it any easier to tell which homes are possible to buy if you contacted and negotiated with them. Even as popular as the MLS is it wouldn’t help.

      There’s also an even bigger problem with your suggestion, the FCC. The FCC has regulations against hoarding and brokering numbers so even if someone contacts me with a great number, we can’t really act as a broker and try to sell it for someone.

      That’s why we’re really not trying to be a central place to buy and sell toll free numbers as I think you’re describing. We’re more like the GoDaddy of the phone number business, just doing a good job as a registrar instead of just leaving that up to the hosting companies who do a lousy job of it.

      Bill

        August 08 Summary at TollFreeNumbers.com says:
        September 16, 2008 at 1:35 am

        […] MarketingWhy are we so different?Ameristar wastes $30,000 for wrong numbers on an 866 number!Why it’s hard to know, who will sell you their number?Has Custom TollFree ‘Locked Up’ your 800 number?More about us RSS […]

          Bill Quimby (291 comments.) says:
          September 26, 2008 at 10:20 pm

          I think the reason I had to write this article is because some people seem to assume that everyone and everything has a price tag hidden somewhere.

            5 reasons why it’s Harder to get a good Toll Free Number than a good Domain Name. at TollFreeNumbers.com says:
            November 12, 2008 at 8:47 am

            […] There’s also no easy way to tell if they would be willing to sell a toll free number to you. There’s no easy way to ask them because they’re usually not used to or considering […]

              Matching Domain Names continued at TollFreeNumbers.com says:
              November 13, 2008 at 7:56 am

              […] and see if they might give up the number for $1000. It’s much harder to do that same thing and figure out who might be willing to sell you their toll free number. So the fact that it’s harder to track down ‘800 numbers’ is why you should start with them […]

                How to pursue 800 numbers that arent available at TollFreeNumbers.com says:
                January 4, 2009 at 6:10 pm

                […] There’s no easy way to get an 800 number that’s not available because there’s no whois lookup, so make sure you have a backup, and don’t ask us to do this […]

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