Comments on: Bido Reinstates Reserve Pricing (with a Catch)

By: nr

nr — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:54:42 +0000

No offense but IMO I think this is a bad idea. Bido.com was different from any other auction places out there including ebay because they had no reserves. Now they will be just like all the rest and not something unique.

By: Sahar Sarid

Sahar Sarid — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:50:07 +0000

Anil,

We do believe the responsibility to market falls on both the seller and us. I wrote more about it here under “best practices”:

http://www.conceptualist.com/2009/03/17/best-practices-your-domain-is-now-on-bido-now-what/

When we listed three letter .com domains with no reserve (we still do, one of them is today) the market, every single time I might add, came forward and paid what is *acceptable market prices* for those domains, in comparison to what they go on other auction houses and message boards. That tells us the market comes through when domains are priced accurately. I wrote a series of articles about accurate pricing on my blog, http://www.conceptualist.com/2009/03/11/the-importance-of-accurate-pricing-part-viii-guest-post-by-darren-cleveland-rmg-ceo/

Comments, feedback most welcome, as always.

Cheers

Sahar

By: Anil

Anil — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:40:41 +0000

When a featured domain name is not sold on an auction house, there could be one of following two reasons.

1. There are no buyers OR good buyers at the auction house.
2. Reserve price is too high.

Which one comes first. Obviously 1 above as for an auction with no reserve wouldn’t get a buyer if auction house has not marketed themselves enough that on that particular day there is no buyer watching an auction.

Therefore penalizing sellers with reserve price is just like pushing your responsibility on to the seller.

-Anil

By: Sahar Sarid

Sahar Sarid — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:57:52 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion, we will explore this further later. For now, we’re focusing on making it work and initial response seems to be positive. I suggest if you have an issue with higher reserve amounts just submit to where you are comfortable, say up to 15K reserve range.

Cheers

Sahar

By: Steve M

Steve M — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:07:55 +0000

I like David’s fee cap idea; I’d think a $500 max or so should be enough to bring in some worthwhile inventory from serious sellers.

By: M. Menius

M. Menius — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:27:37 +0000

Allowing a reserve is a positive and necessary step in order to attract good quality domains. And good quality domains are the ONLY thing which allow Bido’s unique concept to expand outward. To the larger business community, higher tiers, bigger buyers.

By: Lda

Lda — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:37:19 +0000

It’s not enough for an auction house to simply set up a selling vehicle and then take in fees.

Sahar has an outrageous penchant for blaming the seller for failures to sell, when in fact his auction house doesn’t seem to understand marketing fundamentals or its obligations to effectively market their inventory widely.

He constantly misses the point that an auction house must provide sellers with a rich environment of willing buyers. He seems to think that the sellers are responsible for this.

If an auction house cannot attract buyers for any reason, including their own inexperience in marketing, then they should not be surprised when sellers avoid them.

I’ve previously noted that it’s only a matter of time before heavy hitters (like Murdoch et. al.) see the synergy between their established media coverage and other money streams such as auctions.

With their saturation marketing potential at low or zero internal costs, if they do it effectively, all previous players would probably wither, even perhaps eBay.