Back in January, my wife was starting a floral design business, and had decided upon a name for it. Unfortunately, the obviously best domain name for her website was already taken, and being used by a squatter on sedo.com. Rather than dealing with them, she just registered a slightly longer variation that was still available.
Well, her birthday was coming up, so I decided to see what itâd cost to get that âbestâ domain. I went to the site, clicked the link to âmake an offerâ, and entered $100.
Immediately my bid was rejected!
It said the minimum offer the owner of this domain would accept was $777! Highway robbery!
After thinking about it for a little while, I figured, what the hey, itâs a birthday present, and I want to see how this thing works, so I made a (completely insane) bid for $777.
Automatically the system responded saying the owner had made a âcounter-offerâ back⦠$7770!!!
(How iiiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting⦠sedo has a completely automated system for domain owners to counter-bid on domains.)
Well, harrumph. I raised my offer to $800. Immediately I got a âresponseâ from the seller staying firm at $7770, and that was their final offer!
At this point I was curious⦠would they lower their price at all? So, I countered back with what I pretty much figured was the most Iâd spend for this (completely of no value to anybody but my wife) domain, $1150.
What happened next really surprised me⦠I got another automated message stating that I had surpassed some secret minimum offer the seller had set at which they were, no not willing to actually sell the domain for, but at which they were okay with automatically putting it up for a seven-day auction on the front page of sedo.com⦠and my offer was the starting âbidâ!
Gee thanks!
That explained why there are so many domains on that page with just one bid yet really high prices!
Well, at that point I figured Iâd just sit and wait⦠nobody else was going to be bidding more than $1150 for this obscure domain name! And, the auction was ending the day before my wifeâs birthday anyway, so the timing worked out.
I waited the whole week, and of course, nothing happened. The auction was going to end at 8:04 AM on a Saturday, but I didnât even plan on waking up to watch the end.
Whoops. When I did wake up, at 8:12 AM, I (sneakily) immediately checked on the auction⦠only to find that somebody else had won; with a bid of $1175 at 7:56 AM!
I wasnât horribly upset; after all $1150 was an order of magnitude more than Iâd intended to pay. But I just knew in my gut of guts (I have four) that the winning bidder was either the original seller, somebody working for sedo.com, or somebody who figured Iâd pay even more to buy it from them later! One thing I knew it wasnât was anybody intending to actually use the domain.