Should you buy domains on eBay?
Wednesday, October 5th, 2005
First, let’s look at the positives. You can occasionally find a good deal on domains at eBay. ULY.com at $1,699 is a fairly good deal, and other domains have sold below market value. Another advantage is…well, I can’t think of any.
Now for the negatives. The first big drawback to buying domains on eBay is sorting through all of the crap. People post some aweful domains at crazy prices. Here are some listed right now:
NeedMoney.org $175,000
Portfolio of Hurrican Rita domains $5,000,000
LiquidTrust.com $500,000
InternetTravelProducts.com $250,000
CommStation.com $89,000
Roaring.biz $20,000,000
Why are people even paying the listing fees for these domains? Probably to get traffic to the domains. And what a pain to sort through all of this nonsense. Some of these names are decent, but not worth a fraction of the opening bid. The domains category on eBay is just a hodgepodge of domains with no categories. The good news is that at least you can sort by price 
Another drawback to eBay is lack of an integrated escrow service. Afternic and Sedo have streamline escrow systems that make it easy to transfer domains without losing your money. A number of domain sales on eBay are never completed.
You also need to look out for tricks in eBay listings. I saw a decent domain today with a problem in the fine print: A $15 transfer charge. Registrant transfer fees all but disappeared when it became cheap and easy to transfer domains between registrars. If a registrar is charging a registrant change fee, transfer your domains NOW. If the seller is charging a transfer fee for his own pocket, report him to eBay for tacking on additional charges and circumventing eBay’s fee structure. Another trick is to have one name in the title for the listing, but add on “additional words” or hyphens in the actual listing. This just wastes your time. For example, today there’s a listing with a title “Torrent.com” for only $.99. When you click on the listing you see that the domain is actually “TorrentPassword.com”.
Today I came across an auction for eRegulator.com. Not only did it have a $15 transfer charge, but the domain was available for registration! The person didn’t even own it.
Clearly it’s a lot of work to find good domains for sale on eBay. If you want to take advantage of the occasional good domain that sells for a fair price, here’s my method: Check eBay’s domains once a week and sort by “Ending Soonest”. Scroll through the list to find domains that actually have bids and then consider those domains. After all, no domain at a fair price will go through auction without a bid. You can count on other bidders to “screen” the good domains for you.
If you have an eBay domain success story or horror story, please comment.
The banner below will take you to the domain name category, and shows two of the most watched domain name auctions on eBay (so they might be good domains).
Further Reading:
[...] 30,000. iBegin.com sold for a rather high $14,501. HH.org sold for $6,000 on eBay. (See Should you buy domains on eBay?). Next week could be a biggie with the T.R. [...]
[...] domain name scammer
Earlier this month I wrote about buying domains on eBay. Although you can find some good deals, I listed a n [...]
[...] ople from trying to snipe domains at the last second. 2. Stop over-priced listings – TDNAM looks like eBay with some of its rediculously priced domains. Check these [...]
[...] 4% Other 22% TDNAM (GoDaddy) 18% I personally have used all of these venues. You need to be careful about buying domains at eBay, however. Of the three major domain [...]
[...] g sold for $20,000 and BS.net sold for $15,100. Interestingly, BS.net sold on eBay, which rarely sees high quality domain sales. Afternic has completed some other go [...]
[...] I will leave you with this little tidbit; DON’T BUY DOMAIN NAMES FROM EBAY! I use to sell my domains on ebay ( I got one away) but I do understand the article’s concern. [...]
[...] Everyone knows that eBay’s domain name auctions are full of junk. I personally don’t spend any time looking for domains [...]
I have sold one domain on ebay and fortunately it is paid after a day. Some sellers are crazy just like you have said because they offered strange name with high price
When you see a name for sale on ebay and you like it, i think you can still check other places for the name. You may just be able to get a good price for it.
I’m currently selling my domain (shorty.com) through Ebay. The amount of garbage on the site almost kept me from listing there. The featured domain auction was “michaeljacksonautopsyphotos.com” for several million dollars. Are they nuts?
The reason I went with Ebay was to make sure that I’d get paid for the domain at the end of the day – I’ve been getting regular requests to buy the domain, but I’ve been a little leery of getting bad payments.
I hope these people who waste the potential customers time by putting their 20 million dollar dsdfgdsisgodisgreatsatanstolemylawnmover.org type of crap have the following happen to them
1. They have a buyer place the winning bid.
2. They are tagged for 2 million+ in ebay final value fee’s
3. The buyer +/- on the discount page and sends like a buck
4. Some lazy ebay/paypal rep overlooks the detail of the amount sides with the buyer as hey man he paid now give us our 2 million
And for the rest of his life that little turd has debt collectors putting charcoal up his arse to eventually get their gems in whcih they are owed
I detest when people turn a good idea bad.