When it comes to pushing a Sedo offer to an auction, I was a virgin until now.
For the first time, I pushed an offer I received from Sedo.com to auction with the $offer serving as the starting bid.
I have gotten quite a few offers from Sedo in the past six months, resulting in a few sales and a lot of no sales.
When I got an offer through the Sedo.com platform for the domain, LatinGirlfriends.com I decided, instead of trying to negotiate a higher price, I would take the $5K offer and start an auction.
It’s a pretty cool feature to push an offer to an auction and it will be interesting to see what happens.
If you have any experiences with using this push to auction Sedo feature, let me know how it worked out for you
I have used the push to auction feature several times but the results heavily very depending on what the price of the domain is and clearly the “type” of domain being sent to auction.
The good news is that Sedo auctions get a fair amount of eyes but the bad news is that many are domainer eyes looking for a good deal.
Based on the price and domain are the main factors if more bids will come in but at least you have the chance of it going higher with the auction.
Best of luck with the auction!
Very good luck with your fist Sedo auction.
Mike,
That is a great name. As somebody who is married to a latin women such as myself, I can see the demand in that name. Hopefully, it will be priced up much higher for you.
I have personally push many names to Sedo auction. Win some-lose some, but overall I can’t complain. Either way, with your starting price at $5,000 no matter what, I assume your ROI will be real well. Good luck.
Thanks, Jim
The biggest problem I have with SEDO auctions is the end times are crazy, i.e. 02:11 am EST.
Fwiw, I’ve done this twice and received really nasty comments from the initial bidders both times (through Sedo’s tracking page, not external email). Neither realized that the push-to-auction option existed and therefore thought they had blocked out any competition. In the end, both auctions ended with no additional bids so they got what they wanted.
Does it really matter if they’re pissed given that the deal is locked in at the point of pushing to auction? Probably not unless you have other closely related names that they might be interested in the future. Or they’re really irrational and decide to drag you through the mud in a blog posting. Who knows but we’ve all seen weird examples of stuff like this happening.
Obviously both of these scenarios are longshots, but thought it was worth mentioning anyway.
I would agree with Jamie. also, I’m curious if you can share whether you had set a minimum offer price or just ‘make offer’ on this domain? Sedo encourages sellers to list domains with prices saying it increases the likelihood of sales but in my experience it has not really made a difference.
Blog about it every single day the domain auction is still live. The concept of “Traffic” never changes.
I love few things more than when I log into my email account and see an email from Sedo telling me someone has made an offer on one of my domains, followed by the anxiety as I log into my Sedo account to see what the offer was.
Did that sound a bit too romantic/poetic? Anyway, hasn’t happened in a while!
Other Mike
All of our domain have a $2,500 minimum bid
I have used this service, and like SL, I can only suppose that the initial bidder was perturbed that I pushed it to auction – as only one other bidder made a shot at the domain (NumLock.com), and then defaulted on the purchase. I suspect it was the initial bidder getting out of the purchase…and while Sedo approached me with a “would you like to initiate proceedings to reconcile” – I left well enough alone. IMHO – its a coin toss…depends on how serious the initial bidder was…
A problem I have with sending domains to Sedo auction
is the Seller has no ability to control the auction ending time or ending date.
This can be problematic especially if the auction would end on a major holiday or a weekend for a business oriented domain.
Auctions run for 7 days but the clock starts the moment a potential Buyer submits an offer.
Seller can’t delay the auction start to control the ending date.
Thus if a Seller waits four days before sending the domain to auction , the auction will then end in three days.
To me that sucks.
A problem arises when the First Bidder realizes his bid was used to start an Auction and there is no more negotiations …
If the person is not a domainer (or an Industry insider) sometimes they get upset and won’t honor their bid ( providing there is no more bids) , they don’t understand the process …
Hopefully this won’t be the case…
@ Domo Sapiens
Surely a Sedo bid is binding? How can you just not honour your bid?
“Surely a Sedo bid is binding? How can you just not honour your bid?”
Jim,
As Domo Sapiens said some Bidders just don’t pay.
Sedo does either no bidder/buyer educating or a poor job of it.
Sedo should make it very clear to a Bidder that an auction is a possibility and I don’t mean burying that info somewhere on the site.
Sedo should clearly let low ballers know there is a commission the Seller has to pay Sedo.
I can’t tell you how many times I received a $60 offer.
When I let the “buyer” know that the offer is really only $10 to me after Sedo’s $50 commission, many of them profess that they didn’t know that info.
Now I usually list prices but…
even if you list a minimum offer amount, Sedo sends offers in that are below that amount.
Sedo has been very good to us in the past. All transactions have turned out well.
One option they could think about doing is letting the seller give the buyer an option to give a higher price or let it go to auction. Give them two options. As it stands now if you counter offer and they refuse the deal is over with. It’s the chance you take.
So in this case as an option the buyer would have two options. Offer a higher price or let it go to auction if they don’t offer a higher price than 5k. This way it is up to the buyer to make that decision.
Don
I have put ” I reserve the right to send this domain to auction. ” in the offer description section at Sedo. I currently have a few super premium .US domains for sale that I believe will do much better if I send them to auction such as Airline.US , Mortgage.US , or ForSale.US amongst others.
@Don: That seems like an excellent idea. Can’t think of any negatives to the buyer/seller/auction…
MHB, you may be a “push to auction” virgin, but it looks like you’re definitely not a Sedo sales virgin with a seller activity index of 4 out of 5 (I’m a lowly “2”).
Of the few push to auctions I’ve done only one has generated a bid other than the initial one. That’s even with a fair amount of contacting what I thought would be other interested parties.
I wish there were an alternative to Sedo, there are so many lame attributes of that platform (see above). Having essentially no competition makes them fat and lazy, IMHO. Their big “redesign” was a big joke in terms of any new functionality.
Maybe the Bido buyer will have some luck. I sure hope so.
Jim permalink
@ Domo Sapiens
Surely a Sedo bid is binding? How can you just not honour your bid?
*************
Out of my last 4 transactions 2 bidders didn’t pay (as recent as a month ago)
Pat
I did say in the post we have sold a pretty nice volume of domains through Sedo
Domo
The bids are binding just like the sellers obligation to sell but your going to have to enforce your rights in the case of a deadbeat bidder or a seller who refuses to honor the sale.
Sedo.com is not going to sue them for you.
I just completed a sale this morning through Sedo.
This is what I did. (the system is still problematic, but this helped).
The minimum offer was set at 10K.
I received an offer of that amount.
I posted amessage to the buyer using the “open comment” box:
Sedo gives us Two options from here.
1. Negotiating
2. Starting as Auction
As for negotiating, my target price for this domain is $_________.
I am also willing to start an auction, with your offer as the starting / reserve price. The auction would last about 7 days from the time of the offer.
Thank You
* However, you cannot send such a message Without entering a “counter offer” price!
* And, the buyer sees your “counter offer” price instantly …but, the comment has to be approved by Sedo and may not show up for a day or so.
So, the buyer Could see that counter offer price and not bother to come back to read your comment after Sedo approves it.
I sent Sedo an email asking about all this.
There is an easy solution.
Sedo Could wait until they approve your comment and then send Both the counter offer price and your comment at the same time. OR, they could let you send the comment without entering that counter offer price.
I’ve done this 10+ times and almost every time the original bidder gets angry and defaults.
I don’t use this feature of Sedo any more.
Mike, from the perspective of a buyer, the Sedo push to auction ‘feature’ is a horrible user experience. It turns a ‘private’ negotiation into a more ‘public’ one, and it prolongs the transaction with no benefit to the buyer (who may be on a tight timeline). If you are a seller and are considering doing this, think again. All you may achieve is pissing off and losing the original buyer.
@Bill Sweetman
Pardon me, but that is completely idiotic.
Since you represent the notorious domain name warehouser/appropriator Tucows I assume that you’re familiar with whois? It’s the buyer that is hiding behind the cloak of anonymity, particularly in a case where the domain name is not even parked at Sedo.
The seller sets the price, not the buyer. If a buyer makes an offer that’s less than the asking price, and the owner is willing to take a chance on an auction to get more exposure and possibly a better price, more power to them. If the buyer doesn’t want to wait, and wants to stay anonymous – pay the asking price. Pretty simple.
But I forgot, you guys like a rigged game.
Speaking of… I just sent IdentistyRestoration.com to auction on Sedo from a $750 offer.
@Sweetman
…and the mind-boggling IRONY of a representative of Tucows/Yummynames being concerned about pissing off a buyer is just freakin hilarious.
Remember this guy?
http://www.thedomains.com/2008/06/21/ethics-of-domain-drop-auctions-tdnam-and-namejet-called-out-yesterday-today-we-call-out-tucows/
I believe that it all depends on the domain and the amount of the original offer, if I receive a good enough offer on a mediocre domain that normally doesn’t get that much interest then I would probably negotiate with the original buyer and try not to lose the deal, but if I receive an offer on a premium domain that meets the minimum expectations that I have for that domain, but falls short of what I think the domain is really worth then I would probably use that offer as the reserve and send it to auction. Also if I already have a bunch of end-users lined up for a domain then most probably I would send it to auction too. As mentioned above it would probably be best if the buyer were told of the possibility of the domain going to auction ahead of time so that there wouldn’t be any misunderstandings later on. Although I am just beginning to get serious about selling some of my premium domains, so take all these with a grain of salt. 🙂
I never send to auction. My experiences with that, at Afternic, are that the initial bidder has too much time to consider his bid and can simply walk away. Afternic does ZERO to protect the seller so the loss is with the seller. Its just another problem with this industry that doesnt seem to wish to want to grow up. Start requiring a 10% deposit on bids and we’ll see just how many bidders actually walk away without any legal action threatened against them. Start treating sales like the physical real-estate world does.
Don’t worry about it.
Sending this kind of name to auction is a waste of time.
Chances of it attracting another bid (usually domainer at these venues, who else?) is very low.
It’s not the kind of name that’s undervalued or coveted (at $5000) by domainers.
WOW, that is a very nice offer for that domain, I personally would have jumped on that offer, rather than push it to auction!
Anyway, congrats again!
This is one of the rudest things you can do. And I typically cancel transactions INSTANTLY if a seller does this. (Think you can’t? LOL. Easy. Cancel transaction. Close account. Re-register. Done).
Can you imagine buying something in a store and having the woman at the cash register hold your product up and yell “Anyone want this product?”
Would anyone *not* leave the store?
It’s a giant “fuck you” to your customer. I highly recommend against doing this.