Secrets of Selling Your Names at Live Domain Auctions

I’ve been busy submitting some of the names I own to several of the live domain auctions. It’s been a journey and I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned along the way to make your auction submissions a little easier.

I felt that a live auction is a more active selling forum and would provide some more potential that just listing your domains on a web based for sale list like Sedo could provide. The difference, when trying to get your names in a live auction, is that you don’t just list your domains for sale. It’s a two step process. The first step is to submit the domain names you want in the live auction to the auction house. Then an auction selection committee goes through the submitted names and chooses the ones that are actually part of the live auction. Because of the limited time during a live auction there are only a limited amount of domain names they can accept. This can be a pretty considerable hurdle. For instance for the Snapnames Internext and DomainFest auctions they had over 100,000 submissions. From those submissions only about 5,000 names were selected. So its important that the names you submit are both good quality and priced right or they won’t be selected by the committee for inclusion in the auction.

When you list your names you want to make sure you pay attention to the terms and conditions that you are agreeing to. Most auction houses have a period of exclusivity in which you cannot list or market your names anywhere else and if you do happen to sell it through another means, say for instance privately, they are still due the commission.

It’s important to pay attention to the fees and commissions you will be responsible for. One of the conditions for the Snapnames auction is that all names have to be registered at Moniker. If they are not you need to start the transfer process so that it will be completed by the time of the auction so that it doesn’t impede the transfer process. Anyone who has transferred any domains knows that glitches almost always occurs and it usually takes more than the five days they say the transfer will take. If your names are not transferred over Snapnames/Moniker will charge you an extra $100.

Part of the reason for this is to make the transfer process smoother since Moniker handles the whole transfer process through their escrow and only one registrar is involved. The escrow process protects both the buyer and seller. When a domain is sold you transfer your domain to Moniker’s domain escrow account. The seller then transfers the money to Moniker. Once Moniker has the money from the seller it transfers the domain to the seller and send you the money less their commission.

Another part of the reason for requiring the transfer to Moniker is probably a brilliant marketing strategy. If you have 100,000 submissions and you are telling all of those people they need to transfer to Moniker or they get charged an extra hundred bucks it probably results in a lot of new customers and a big chunk of change.

Other live auction houses don’t force you to transfer your name name around. For instance one that I spoke with said they maintained escrow accounts at a dozen of the major registrars and they could work with whatever registrar the seller was using.

Another one of the conditions you should be aware of is what happens if you make a mistake. What happens if you mistype and enter a domain you don’t really own? It happened to me. Since the template for the Snapnames auction would not accept my excel file (I’m told the problem has since been fixed) I was forced to use the web based form which involved some cutting, pasting, and typing. Somehow I mistyped a domain name leaving out an s. That name, a name I did not own, was chosen for the auction. When I checked the catalog and noticed the error I called the company immediately to correct the problem and was informed by the terms and conditions I was liable for $119 fee.

That’s bad but not as bad as it could be. In one of the terms and conditions forms at one of the other auction houses it said that if there was an error made you were liable for the full commission AS IF it had been sold. So if you were selling mybigdomain.com for a reserve of $10,000. and the auction house charged a 20% commission you could be on the hook for $2,000 big ones.

Now that you know what to look for and have the basics of listing your names at a live auction my next post will give you some hints on getting them accepted by the auction selection committee.

All the best,
Ted Sudol
The Domain Hunter

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