Domain auction platform Bido makes more changes.
You have to hand it to Bido. They relentlessly brainstorm, create, and tweak features to make their platform better.
About a month ago Bido starting allowing multiple auctions per day and allowed users to vote on domains for auction. This caused some problems. Namely, a lot of low quality domains are at auction and selling for less than registration fee. Those that do sell would have sold for more if they were the only auction of the day.
Given some of these shortcomings, I knew it was only a matter of time before Bido tried to correct them. Today the company announced a whole slew of new features. Here’s how I rate the main ones.
Guarantee Program – Domains go through a private “pre-auction” where companies like NameMedia compete to buy the domain. Once the private auction is over, sellers can either a) accept the auction result b) choose to send the domain to a public auction with the guarantee as the opening bid or c) walk away with the domain.
My take: Interesting. I don’t see why any buyers would participate in these auctions. I assume that a seller will always choose option b or c, so the bidders are just helping the sellers get traction.
Auction Acceleration – instead of waiting for the community to vote your domain in after 30 days, pay $8.88 per domain to get them listed right away.
My take: this is basically a listing fee. I like paid listing fees, as they provide an economic incentive for people to submit only good domains.
$28 Starting Bids – No more $1 starting bids.
My take: I guess the idea is reg fee + $20? This is good, as it will prevent shockingly low sales of $1 or $2.
One Auction Contract for Sellers – No more filling out a contract for each domain you list.
My take: Beautiful.
Now, we also have to look at these changes on a global scale. My concern is that Bido is getting complicated. It has moved from one auction a day at $1 to multiple auctions at varying prices with reserves or no reserve, multiple chatrooms, etc.
Overall I’m excited about these changes. And if any of them don’t work as planned, we can rest assured that Bido will tweak them.
Thanks Andrew for covering this news of ours here at Bido. As you indicated, if any of the changes turn out to be too complicated, we will proactively seek them out and update accordingly to simplify things. There are many selling formats that sellers require for whatever reason of theirs, and as the platform provider, we work on building our product to create balance.
I feel like these guys had a good concept to start off with, but are just shooting themselves in the foot the more and more they go on. Their whole system is overly complex now and feels like it needs an entire handbook to understand. K.I.S.S.