Over the last few years we have published a series The good, the bad and the ugly. Readers have been able to leave their feedback and some companies have reached out over the years and let me know they took the posts to heart.
This year I want to try to change it up a bit and, What they do right and what they do wrong. Focusing in a little deeper to give better feedback to industry participants.
When posting what they do wrong, please give your suggestions on how they could improve upon what they are doing wrong.
Do not take ad hominem or personal cheap shots. Speak about the company and give some background on how long you have been a customer.
Do not use the post as an opportunity to promote your company or a competitor.
Today we focus on DropCatch, What do they do right and what do they do wrong?
Other Right/Wrong posts.
WRONG:
They don’t award the domain to the next legitimate bidder which is the right thing to do just as GoDaddy auctions does, and they conduct a re-auction thereby wasting everyone’s time.
They also make the re-auctions PUBLIC instead of PRIVATE which is a betrayal to the original participants which appears to be clearly aimed to inflate the auction ending price.
They also lately are refusing to disclose the alias of the delinquent bidder and not clearly state in the initial E-mail what actions they took against the delinquent bidder.
Many of these issues were discussed a few months ago here:
https://domaininvesting.com/fraudulent-bidder-on-dropcatch-com/
Afaik all auctions @ Dropcatch are public
Yes, but it is not fair for new bidders that were not a part of the original auction to now participate/bid in the re-auction which has been deemed an unfair practice by many industry members. Yet, they have consistently ignored this very valid point/concern.
The public auction thing keeps me from using them. I spend countless hours trying to identify domains worthy of a back order. For this reason I will stick with SnapNames.
Logs me out in what seems like every 2 minutes. ANNOYING!
The BAD about dropcatch they didn’t clone snapnames bidding interface, which is the easiest and best for domain auctions, you can bid down at snapnames #1 best feature, not at DropCatch.
The BAD to many menu options to get what you want with the latest interface, the better/easier one was 2 gen ago, I believe, new and improved isn’t always that.
The GOOD
To me, DropCatch is the #1 domain dropping catcher, PERIOD, they way the make up for selling to you cheaply is have all auctions PUBLIC rather private like snapnames.
The owners are in a position they do not need to sell on dropcatch and just keep all domains for themselves, if you really believe you “pick” special names that no one else see’s then they will get it for you, problem is that rarely the case, if YOU are really picking a name that others were no chasing, you would win it as we do. .. I use to put in domains at $25 as I won a ton at $59, except who I lost to was NameBright as their rules say if they are chasing the same domain and you don’t bid $59 they will keep it. So after 9 months of trying, I just went to $59 a domain, and have won 50% of the domains I chase at $59, we have over 5000 domains at DropCatch.
Their price is $20 less than Snapnames, so I give DropCatch some slack on minor issues.
The issue of fraud bidding, their is NO perfect solution. Snapnames had halvaraz which was a snapnames employee who drove bidding, open issue with their past. NO CLUE on the perfect solution, doesn’t seem so bad the way it is now.
The problem with awarding to the next lowest bidder is, Drop Catch would get more $$ that way, as the fake bidder probably inflated the price up; aka Halvaraz issues.
Is DropCatch perfect? NO, they are the best for .com’s except about 1 time per week, snapnames outperforms them..i don’t like those days 🙂
NOTE: Snapnames is a good company overall, I am not worried about 2006/2007 issues.