The dispute.com sale did not go through at $65,000 but rather $38,000.
The unfurling of the story and subsequent comments on DomainInvesting.com tell a lot. It also seems that GoDaddy needs to make some changes.
Joe Styler who works for GoDaddy left a comment:
The reason for default was not that there were not legitimate bids. We are pretty good at making sure that the bids are good on our auctions. The problem was the price and the speed needed to make payment on that amount. Since it is an expired domain we have very little time to collect payment and assign the domain after the auction ends. I don’t want to go into it all but the name is a great domain the people who bid wanted to buy it. Payment speed was the issue. There are restrictions on how much money can leave certain countries in certain timeframes, credit card payments that high are possible but limited. Many banks or customers cannot/will not process a payment that large. Even a US based winner with cash needs to get the cash to us somehow and with some of the timeframe being a weekend the banks were not able to get the money wired to us in the time we needed. I believe the buyer was someone who could use an AMEX with high limit to make payment in the right timeframe. I think everyone who bid on this name wanted it and could pay, just not fast enough.”
So 5 bidders said they could not pay in a certain time frame. When you read the comments AbdulBasit.com pointed out how this method could be used to game the system. Not the first time people mentioned that one person can run the name up and a friend be waiting in third or fourth position to buy the name at a lower price.
Elliot properly mentioned that some people after losing an auction spend their money elsewhere.
But here was a back and forth that I think should push GoDaddy to amend their bidding TOS.
As much as I’d want to pay the same day, there is absolutely no way for my payment to reach GD in even 5 days (I live on the opposite side of the world with a lot of regulations around making large payments outside the country. So your situation does not apply to everyone across the globe!
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Its not Godaddy’s fault that your country is so restrictive with money. I’m afraid people from certain countries just shouldn’t bid in these big money auctions.
I have to agree with JZ 100%, if you know you can’t get money there within a certain timeframe, then don’t bid, you by your own admission cannot complete the transaction.
GoDaddy needs to make it clear, by bidding in an auction you can pay within X amount of time. If you don’t you will be banned from GoDaddy auctions with no chance of this ban being overturned.
Another thing that I have spoken about many times is bidder id’s. Many are in support of this but GoDaddy is unwilling to do this. Bidding id’s would help with transparency and to see if people are playing games in auctions.
I know marketplaces say trust us and our systems. For years domainers have been saying we don’t trust your systems.
Either you believe in transparency or you don’t.
im not sure this makes sense, an expired name has already been charged the annual renewal and is live for another full year,
and in big time cases im sure no one minds letting the refund of $8 go.
seems like an extension could be handled to make the extra cash.
most of us out think you simply cant walk away from a bid, and opening up the , well i cant get my money in time loophole seems problematice.
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the meme i dont want to get get extended is “rules are rules” until they arent.. and we’ll tell you later which ones we will fudge on
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i don’t believe in transparency. it as left this market long time. it has been leaving all businesses.
but let’s us keep up playing and side along with all these crooks.
Thanks for the post, had no idea an auction just keeps going to the next bidder. Easy to game.
For an extra $30k I’d wait a few extra days to get paid. GD should extend their payment time. Domainers sometimes wait weeks/months for a deal to close. Why not 10 business days to make payment? Buyer should also be responsible for knowing their own country money transfer rules.
“So 5 bidders said they could not pay in a certain time frame.”
That is a problem for Godaddy, not the customer. If Godaddy want to frame it as 5 customers in a row all making mistakes then Godaddy better get used to getting only 50% of the value for the names they are auctioning.
Get your act together Godaddy!
This person can prefund their godaddy account, they should have known instead of playing loose with other bids.
So is this person suspended, or do they get a pass to go bid on the next auction.
The entire integrity of the godaddy auction platform is fixed, any bid you put automatically has a scripted bot from one of many large players that will match it and turn a $5 closeout turd into a 3 figure bid instantly.
Godaddy is not playing fair by allowing these non named bidders to tax innocent buyers with their bots!
$65,000 prefund? And should all 5 underbidders who couldn’t get the money to Godaddy within 48 hours have done this?
It’s called good as gold, and godaddy will wire it back, if you don’t think you can make the timeline for payment, prefund, so you can claim your auction. It is no secret many other districts can’t fund fast enough, that is their problem, not other bidders.
If they are serious bidders, and can’t meet the payment deadlines, they should prefund, many auctions do this.
It would cost thousands in foreign exchange costs, people are not going to do that for the chance to “maybe” win an auction. All this stuff is just going to lower prices if Godaddy ever required it.
There are some incorrect assumptions being tossed around, I want to clear a few things up.
First, only the winner of the auction is required to pay for an auction. If the top bidder falls out, we contact the subsequent bidders, but they are not required to pay.
Second, we monitor high-dollar auctions closely. As this auction started to rise in price, we knew each of the bidders were legitimate and could afford the price of the auction.
Third, since these are expiration auctions, there’s quick turnaround for payment. If we aren’t able to collect the money in time, the domain will continue through the expiration process.
With that information, let’s work through what happened. This auction ended on a Tuesday. We give buyers a reasonable amount of time to pay for their auction. It became clear the winning bidder was not going to be able to pay on Friday afternoon. We started to reach out to the rest of the bidders.
While we have no doubts the bidders immediately following him could afford to pay for the domain name, there were logistical issues. Friday after noon PST means most banks won’t wire money until Monday, which is too late. Most credit cards won’t allow that big of a transaction, so that’s not an option. Even if someone had cash, it would have been difficult to get the cash to us in the amount of time needed.
The best option is an extremely high limit credit card that allows large transactions. The person who was able to capture the name had a card available that was able to do that.
So in summary – all bidders at the top were legitimate bidders. We were tracking this and knew who they were. Given appropriate time, we are confident the bidders who couldn’t pay on Friday afternoon would have been able to pay. The auction ended on a Tuesday, had they won on Tuesday there was time for them to complete payment in time. The top bidder has had action taken against their bidding account, to prevent things like this from happening in the future.
I hope this helps answer some questions.
You know the finances of each bidder? Then maybe you should have extended them credit, if you know your customers so well.
The whole thing smells bad.
“Third, since these are expiration auctions, there’s quick turnaround for payment. If we aren’t able to collect the money in time, the domain will continue through the expiration process.”
Of course you could halt the expiration process on a high value name going through the auction process yourselves, rather easily. You could also schedule the auction for such a high profile domain so it doesn’t end on a Thursday.
It’s time to implement user IDs into GoDaddy Auctions, Joe.
We need more transparency.
Been writing about that for awhile, had a poll on Namepros. GoDaddy has no intention of implementing bidder ids based on previous comments.
bidder id’s are nice but there is a way to abuse that as well. People will come to recognize which bidder id’s they can run up.
Anything can be abused, bidder id’s are the lesser of two evils in my opinion. The majority of people bidding there want them. GoDaddy doesn’t want them and some people have some interesting thoughts on why they don’t want them.
i guessed it would sell for $48k, but marek actually came closest guessing 35k 🙂
https://www.thedomains.com/2018/07/29/dispute-com-expired-where-will-it-close/
The only thing that mattered for that post was where the auction closed, how much profit GoDaddy means nothing. The auction closed at $65,000 and GreenJobs won. Donation made.
@JoeStyler you state “Second, we monitor high-dollar auctions closely. As this auction started to rise in price, we knew each of the bidders were legitimate and could afford the price of the auction.”
Hold on a second right there, if you believed what you just wrote than for an additional $30,000+/- you needed to make an exception here like the one you made monitoring it more than normal. Either way a very very foolish business management decision and whomever is the one who made this call needs to push for a policy change take place in terms of cost and payment deadlines or have at least made an effort to not cost yourselves $30,000 and made an executive decision.
Honestly the most foolish thing I’ve read in a while and sad to hear coming from such a great company.
Perhaps they don’t want to start getting involved in giving payment extentions as where do you draw the line and how many people want or deserve them.
I agree but to avoid that dispute you could create a cut off or payment period ladder. So higher the price=longer time to pay.
Nobody is buying this period. If someone got 30k for DISPUTE COM they made off like total internet bandits
and should not be complaining. The bid game on every site is rigged period. Shill bidders everywhere in a greedy attempt to drive up the prices! There is so much greed and dishonesty in the domain business sometimes it is just hard to believe. Most domainers will go there whole life and not even see a 1k domain sale, and these people are crying about only getting 30k+ for a crap name? WTF is a person going to do with dispute com? Lets see if it gets developed and on the web soon. I doubt it. Take the money$$ from that sale @ Run FAST!
If you think dispute.com is a crap name please get out of domaining, you know nothing.
Dispute.com is a great name! Period!
$30K is a fraction of it’s true value.
Shill bidding is a chronic domain name industry issue/problem.
@jennifer
The domain King , Rick Schwartz will teach you all you will ever have to know about the domaining business.
One thing I abhor about the domain name business is, domainers shitting on other people’s domain names.
Strange practice!
Dispute.com is easily worth $250000 USD, so the buyer did very well, IMHO
@Raymond, how much time does a wire transfer take for you to send funds outside of your country? Max time?
1 to 2 days max.
was this game of auction to raise the value of the domain? I wonder maybe.
Also just a lot of GoDaddy bidding deadbeats out there. Dealing with one who bid 600, then 4800 (and claimed that he never bid that and it was a mistake), then 1300, won, and still didn’t pay. There’s no excuse over such a small amount of money.
Okay so I must update in that far past when I would have thought possible, the guy actually just paid. So this one was not a deadbeat.
I don’t what is the dumber comment, the line from GoDaddy or people saying a one word name like Dispute.com is crap.
When I heard the sale of dispute.com, I was thinking of creating the domains of the dispute with other extensions. I am thankful for advise I got here on this forum, not to have. Now DISPUT.COM is in dispute.
Payment timeframe out of touch with real world. Local wires between our local banks in Australian can be a few days, so international can be way longer. Customer usually aren’t bankers with advanced knowledge on the intracacies of the transaction games that banks play. Maybe at least 14 days is realistic.
Maybe GoDaddy should pay for the difference… but, it would be even better if GoDaddy just had some sense of ethics and better business practices. GoDaddy is a company who’s abusing of their owns customers to make a few dollars.
Why doesn’t godaddy show user names, or a user number?
Why are their robots countering each simple bid?
Who are these players in the background, what kind of deal does Turncommerce have with Godaddy?