Domain name owners jump on Sedo’s new Direct Auction option.
Apparently there’s quite a bit of demand to start an auction on the Sedo marketplace.
Sedo’s new Direct Auction, which lets anyone start a domain name auction, had 150 orders on launch day yesterday.
You can see many of the domains on Sedo’s Marketplace Auctions page. There’s no clear delineation between Direct auctions and others, but the scheduled auctions and some of the auctions with six days left include many owner-initiated auctions.
Now the challenge is for the added exposure and auction format to result in sales. Given the $59 listing fee, I suspect that quality and sell-through rates will be self-correcting. If people list poor quality domains that don’t sell, they’ll stop paying $59 to list their domains. Only better domains at better prices will be listed in the long run. I’m not sure how long that is, though.
This is an interesting new offering and I will keep a close eye on it.
Agreed, only sellers that can send quality traffic to the auction will benefit from this.
I signed up and my auction for BSEE.com ( Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering) starts tomorrow at 11 am. Hopefully it gets good visibility and sells.
I think it’s a great idea for Sedo to do this. Obviously they feel the Flippa heat. I doubt this would be a SEDO option for sellers if Flippa did not exist.
That is $59 flat fee on top of a 15% commission if it sells? Why is this worth $50 more then listing at Flippa? I think Flippa has a bigger crowd scanning auctions, and more importantly that crowd at Flippa has a good number of website developers. I imagine mainly domainers/resellers scanning a Sedo daily auction page.
“Why is this worth $50 more then listing at Flippa?” You’re thinking of just the initial $9 listing fee at Flippa, to be seen you need to pay for upgrades which are more.
Sure but what exposure is Sedo giving for the extra $50? A rotating spot on the homepage for 10 or 15 domains at one time out of 150 auctions that this article mentions? So one out of every 10 or 15 visitors might see my domain on the homepage? I’d rather hand reg 5 .com domains for the extra $50.
I agree. Not with the extra $50. No where does Sedo explain what I am getting above and beyond setting up an auction at Flippa. I am sure it will work from some but not for me.
We just ordered one of these auctions this morning with a solid one-word domain…we’ll see what happens.