“Are you Serious?” That’s a question I have for a lot of domain name sellers.
I came across a thread at DNForum in November of last year started by the site’s owner, Adam Dicker. He was complaining about a big he placed on Sedo and the rediculous counter offer he received:
Bid Thread for godfather.com:
2005-11-10 Desired Price: Make Offer
2005-11-10 Your Offer: 4,000 EUR
2005-11-10 Seller´s Counter Offer: 1,000,000 EUR
This stuck out to me, especially when I saw a few months later that GodFather.com sold for €15,000.
I did some research and found that Adam hadn’t bought the domain. I also questioned why someone would respond with a crazy number like €1M to an offer that wasn’t too far off. It someone offers $4k for a domain, they are likely to increase their offer many times. As Adam said in his forum, he would have likely paid €30,000-€40,000 for the domain had the owner made a realistic counter offer.
I’ve felt some of the same frustrations lately. The first bid that was a waste of my time was on a decent two word domain. The seller listed a price expectation (“Desired Price”) in his thread of $100. When I made an offer of $100 the user countered at $3,000! S(he) also used one of the canned bidding responses “I’m also negotiating with other Sedo users.” This wasn’t true, since according to the domain stats I was the first person to make a bid on the domain. I countered the $3,000 offer with another $100 offer, which was the seller’s original asking price, pointing out that the seller was not honoring the desired price and was lying about negotiating with other Sedo users. The seller countered again at $3,000, so I cancelled the negotiation. Had the original desired price been $3,000, or even $5,000, I may have been willing to pay $3,000, but not after the seller wasted my time. (I purchased a domain yesterday for $1,250 that had a desired price of $1,500. I made a respectful $1,000 initial offer and the seller didn’t jerk me around. I was happy to pay close to his asking price.)
Another one that frustrated me was a $1,000 offer I put in for a good compound word. I probably would have been willing to go up to $20k or so. But the bidder responded with a $1M counteroffer and said he’d turned down many offers for over 6 figures. If that’s the case I certainly understand not wanting to entertain my low offer. But here’s what gets me. Sedo let’s you set a minimum amount for offers. This is different from the “desired price” in that it isn’t displayed until you make an offer too low, and it also isn’t your asking price. If you set your floor at $100,000, you’re not saying you’ll sell for $100,000, you’re just saying not to waste the seller’s time unless you’re serious. By not setting a floor, the seller of this domain wasted both of our time.
I made a $3,000 offer for a quality domain over the weekend. The seller responded with a $2.3M counteroffer and pointed me to a list of the highest domain name sales of all time. What was the seller’s point? His domain was good, but not worthy of showing up on a “top sales of all time” list. There are no comparable domains that have sold for more than $50k or so. Much like the seller of GodFather.com, I think this seller passed up a legitimate buyer and will only be dissapointed in the long run.
Now I get as annoyed as anyone when someone places a lowball bid on my domains. I get offers for under $100 for Blogs.info all of the time. I paid many thousands for this domain. But lowball bids are the price I have to pay when I don’t set a minimum bid price. If I get a lot of low bids on a particular domain then I add a minimum offer price to set expectations. If someone is willing to at least start out at the minimum then I hope we can come to an agreement.
In summary:
1. If you place realistic counteroffers you’ll typically sell the domain for more than than if you set unrealistic counteroffers.
2. Don’t complain about lowball bids if you don’t set a minimum price.
3. Let’s keep the buying and selling going!
Ramiro says
The negotiation process can be tedious and frustrating. This is especially true when a seller has high expectations for a piece of internet real estate. With the recent coverage of domain names in the mainstream press, expectations will continue to run high. However, educating the seller about the market for a particular type of domain name may bring about the desired results. A little patience can go a long way.
Alexander says
Not surprised. I once made an offer at Sedo and the counter offer was something like $10,000,000! The seller did not set a minimum price.