Or do they have another purpose for listing domains for sale on eBay?
Believe it or not, there are currently over 14,000 listings in the Domain Names section on eBay.
That’s a lot of active listings for a site that most domain name investors never visit. Why is this? Are people actually making money selling domains on eBay, or do they use it for some other purpose (such as driving clicks to domain names)?
Looking more closely, there are only about 1,000 active auction. The rest of the listings are “Buy Now/Make Offer”, which makes the listings similar to those on most domain name marketplaces.
Humorously, over half of the listings in the category have been marked with the type “Premium Domain Name”. If you select only the premium domains, you’ll find such beauties as BlabJab.com, Encyclopeoplia.com, ChessDrone.com and ListenToSongsOnline.com.
I count about 75 of the 1,000 auctions with bids, and only two have bids for over $100.
Some people have lofty expectations for their domain names on Ebay. FeeAppraisal.com can be yours for “Bargain Buy it Now Pricing” of $1,990,000.00. Before you say “Hey, that’s expensive”, keep in mind that the seller has an online appraisal pinning it at up to $1.41 billion.
This gets to one of my questions…is this person just listing the domain for sale to get people to go visit FeeAppraisal.com? You shouldn’t go there, because you’ll get a couple pop up ads, including one that tries to mimic the flash download box.
Lots of people turn to eBay to sell current event related domain names. When Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana was born, the owner of CharlotteElizabethDina.com tried to sell it on eBay.
Original listing asked for $200,000 and claimed to have an offline offer of $68,000.
Now it’s up for sale just $25,000.
What gives?
aron says
Seriously. There are some people with horribly unrealistic expectations on there.
RaTHeaD says
i like the people that thought up a great name and registered it with a coupon code from godaddy for 99 cents. then they sell it for four dollars and and make a nice profit.
Pete Prestipino says
I think it’s really a volume play. There are sellers that list hundreds of domain names at a time and if one or two sell, even for a modest amount, it’s worth the time – particularly when there are no listing or success fees. I’ve sold a few on there but most use the platform to drive awareness for other services (as you illustrated well with the FeeAppraisal example).
Andrew Allemann says
When do you not have to pay listing and success fees? I’ve seen specials from eBay where you don’t pay to list, but not where everything is free.
Jason Davis says
I have done well buying names on ebay. One name sticks out where I bought a name for under 10 bucks and sold it within a year for almost $900 through Sedo. I find there are some great deals there.
Kevin M. says
“”…registered it with a coupon code from godaddy for 99 cents. then they sell it for four dollars and and make a nice profit.””
Yeah, I think this is the now thing there on ebay. And for some, depending on where they are, that equates out well. But it’s either these listings now days, or the ones that think ‘any domain’ they register is a winning lottery ticket! ..good grief.
One used to be able to pick up some good names there a few years back, but that program has been dead for a long time.
Robert says
Whats amazing to me is how badly ebay missed the boat to be what flippa is today. Its probably not too late, but they’d have to staff up and start cleaning up the show quite a bit. Or just buy flippa for a cool 10 figures
Larry says
Why not write to a few of them and simply ask them what their game is? It would make an interesting blog post, regardless of what the responses were.
thelegendaryjp says
Ebay is a decent way to look at traffic, get exposure and sometimes trade a name.
In the past I sold a great first name dot com, 2 LL .org’s and a LL .net on ebay totaling roughly $250k.
It is simply a different avenue and even if it did not work most times neither do most of the market place alternatives.
Picking out ridiculous ebay listings is easier, imagine if you got to see the millions across the forums, godaddy, sedo and afternic etc The well priced names will sell eventually no matter what market place or approach you take, ebay is just one of them.
Andrew Allemann says
Good point on finding ridiculous listings.
Richard says
Like many marketplaces, ebay has it’s perks. Where else can I list a domain and donate a portion of the sales price to a charity, in one transaction? Or set an auto accept amount for a best offer..it’s also nice to talk to the buyer or seller directly.
Like Jason said, there are some decent buys. I’ve bought a few nice 5L.com from there. The seller watch-list is nice, find the right sellers to follow.
DNSal.es says
There were over 10,000 domain names sales on eBay in the past.
However most of them low, very low, except for few jewels:
http://dnpric.es/stats/stats-by-broker/?broker=eBay
eBay is another Bido, with wider audience.
HIGH SPARROW says
Ebay is good for picking up short brandables and LLLL.com’s but not for selling high quality domains but some people have picked up some gems there.
I know for a fact Elliot Silver bought CREOLE.COM there for $4,000 about 2 years ago. I know because I contacted the seller after the no reserve auction ended with no bidders at a starting price of 5K. I lowballed him with a 2K offer but said in his own words that he had just sold it for 4K. A week later Elliot Silver mentioned he just purhcased Creole.com and that it was up for sale at a minimum price of $65,0000 . He sold it not longer for an undisclosed amount I can assume was nothing less than $50K.
So a $50K+ profit in 6 months with an Ebay listing. so you can get good deals out there, you just have to filter through all the crap.
Dan says
I’ve had pretty good success selling mostly LLLL.com on eBay since early 2008. I’ve sold about a thousand low-quality LLLL there over the years (many of which are now probably Chinese premiums) but now I just list high-quality ones. I usually get a sale or two a month from eBay. Last month we sold one for $4.5k and another for $3.5k through there. http://stores.ebay.com/Short-Domains
If you decide to sell there, always use Escrow as PayPal doesn’t protect the seller when it comes to digital goods.
Andrew Allemann says
It sounds like eBay can work, it’s just a lot of working sorting through all of the junk to find the gems.
thelegendaryjp says
It’s easy Andrew, start from the $9,999,999 names and work down from there LOL
Sam says
With a “Daily Revenue” of $3,880,554 USD, why doesn’t the owner just sit on it? Oh, here’s why: “All traffic and earnings values are estimates only”. Ah, so the *actual* revenue is $3.8mil +/- $3.8mil…
James P. says
Its not a bad place for low-medium range domain sales if you have time to sift through all the cookie cutter “established site!” scammy domains. Forget premium domains. One thing I do is search by number of bids.
weboverdrive says
Search for domain names on eBay. On the left column, choose sold listings.Rank auctions on high to low price results
you should see this
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1&_nkw=domain+names&_sop=16
Copy and paste the html into an excel file. Use paste special-txt. Now use this excel file to add the dollar value of all these sold domains on eBay. There should be 4,399+ domains sold in the last week or so. Now compare the total dollar amount and number of domains sold on eBay to the points made on your article. Cheers,
guru says
not only in ebay this happens everywhere flippa sedo grabflip godaddy are not exceptions.
Even a crappy is termed premium and listed in auctions , a domain not worth more than $xx are getting marketted for $xxx