Sedo now allowing non-paying bidders to CONTINUE!

[JuniperPark]

Several weeks ago an offer was made on a domain name I had listed at Sedo. Several negociations later, a price was agreed to. I was required to take my time to download, complete, and fax back a lengthy domain sales contract. Then... nothing. Seller didn't bother to pay. As usual, *I* had to keep asking Sedo to cancel the transaction and BAN the buyer from Sedo so I (and other buyers) don't have my time wasted by this clown again. Sedo kept telling me to be patient, and finally agreed he wasn't going to pay. Here is their response on the identity of the 'non-buyer' and their response to my demand that he be banned:

----[ Begin Sedo Message ]----
Here is the buyer\'s info:

Organization: webelements AG
Name: Lutz
First Name: Martin
Street: Seltersweg 87
City: 35390 Gießen
Country: Deutschland
Phone: +49-641 96997 11
Email: [email protected]

Please note that the transfer has been cancelled (as seen in the previous email), however, I will not cancel the buyer\'s Sedo account as this situation was an exception to his normal business proceedings.

----[ End Sedo Message ]----

If Sedo is going to allow deadbeat bidders, I really don't need Sedo. Even eBay is better than this. It is now a regular occurance that bidders do not pay on Sedo; now I see why.

Is anyone else experiencing non-paying Sedo bidders?

 

[Tippy]

Isn't that what a deadbeat would prob. do anyways, look all good and honest at first then turn around and you know what... in the end?

 

[Theo]

Quoted to retain the identity of the deadbeat buyer. And trust me, Google will have his contact info spidered in no time.

Several weeks ago an offer was made on a domain name I had listed at Sedo. Several negociations later, a price was agreed to. I was required to take my time to download, complete, and fax back a lengthy domain sales contract. Then... nothing. Seller didn't bother to pay. As usual, *I* had to keep asking Sedo to cancel the transaction and BAN the buyer from Sedo so I (and other buyers) don't have my time wasted by this clown again. Sedo kept telling me to be patient, and finally agreed he wasn't going to pay. Here is their response on the identity of the 'non-buyer' and their response to my demand that he be banned:

----[ Begin Sedo Message ]----
Here is the buyer\'s info:

Organization: webelements AG
Name: Lutz
First Name: Martin
Street: Seltersweg 87
City: 35390 Gießen
Country: Deutschland
Phone: +49-641 96997 11
Email: [email protected]

Please note that the transfer has been cancelled (as seen in the previous email), however, I will not cancel the buyer\'s Sedo account as this situation was an exception to his normal business proceedings.

----[ End Sedo Message ]----

If Sedo is going to allow deadbeat bidders, I really don't need Sedo. Even eBay is better than this. It is now a regular occurance that bidders do not pay on Sedo; now I see why.

Is anyone else experiencing non-paying Sedo bidders?

 

[fischermx]

I am in a similar experience currently.
After several negotiations I agreed a price with buyer.
The current status of the transaction is that they have to verify his personal details !
Wow, that's funny, basically that opens the door for any joker to jump in and make a thousands offers and never pay.

 

[JuniperPark]

I am in a similar experience currently.
After several negotiations I agreed a price with buyer.
The current status of the transaction is that they have to verify his personal details !
Wow, that's funny, basically that opens the door for any joker to jump in and make a thousands offers and never pay.

I've had this happen as well!!! Common sense should tell you that Sedo should be asking this information BEFORE THEY ARE ALLOWED TO BID!

 

[768768]

How long does Sedo give the buyer to respond?

Currently I accepted an offer but haven't heard from the buyer since. I believe it will go nowhere.

 

[Jak]

This same thing has happened twice to me at Sedo. In both cases I waited patiently, over a month, for the payment to arrive. In the end, nothing. Canceled. In the mean time I was not accepting any other offers on those sites\domains.

I do have pretty much everything on my domains for sale page linking to the Sedo pages, so the buyer can get some info about the traffic\interest in a particular domain, but I'm going to change that and just have all offers come through me personally from now on.

Sedo needs to punish deadbeat bidders. They should have a feedback system or something in place like eBay does to prevent at least some of this ridiculousness.

 

[robert]

Likewise - have had three cancelled sales after the buyer has bought at a buy it now price.

Various excuses have been offered up but still no action taken.

With the anon nature of sedo its hard to see how this encourages any faith in the system for buyers as who is to say if they are shill / fake buyers bidding to increase bids and make sedo look more popular?!

I did get offered a free 'featured listing' for two months after complaining however I told them where to stick it.

 

[rshldm]

Same experience here.
Buyer said he had sent payment, but Sedo didn't receive it.

It took Sedo 3 weeks to decide to cancel the offer. And my energy and time were both wasted.
The Sedo representative told me that due to the inaction of the other party I might have grounds for legal action, based upon Sedo’s binding bidding system. But I simply don't know what legal action I can take.

Those bidders with no intention to buy are really disgusting and annoying.

 

[Theo]

Was there a signed contract involved? Not the electronic kind, the paper version.

 

[rshldm]

Was there a signed contract involved? Not the electronic kind, the paper version.

No, I didn't sign a paper version.

This just leads to another question I have, under what circumstances do we need to sign the paper version contract? Cause Sedo didn't ask me to do so when the agreement was reached.

How is the online contract different from the paper one?

 

[Theo]

I will let you know once the buyer of my ongoing sale actually signs the paper contract (which he required in the first place) :-D

 

[topfetch]

Same experience for me too. I had a few clowns making false bids and getting my hopes up and Sedo as well telling me they are legitimate buyers and in the end nothing. Thats the big problem for me with Sedo because it has happened atleast 5 times from what I can remember off the top of my head and its very very annoying.

 

[seeker]

Same here!!!
They are verifying the contact info of the buyer. That is ridiculous!!!!!
This should have happened BEFORE.
Now what? it has been 10 days with that status, and the domain is 'locked' in that I have to hold my end of the agreement, and cant sell it anywhere else.
Really sad.

 

[SedoCoUk]

Hi everyone,

First of all a quick answer on the contracts:
The written contract and the online contract are basically the same thing. There are simply a fair amount of people out there who still don't trust online practices and would prefer to have the "security" of a paper contract. However, we are aware that this slows down the process considerably and we are phasing out the written contract in the very near future as part of our streamlining of the transfer system.

Onto the more difficult point of fake bidders: I think I mentioned in another post that we are doing all we can to weed out fake bidders and bogus buyers. We are looking at a number of measures that can be taken and we do review every single case of fake buyers and will normally sternly warn them with regard to their future practice or ban them outright if we feel it is justified. To many of you, it may seem that we are biassed on the side of the buyers. The fact is that our job is to find buyers for you guys, the sellers. We are very wary of being heavy-handed with buyers because we may scare off potential, bona fide buyers whilst targeting the bad guys.
This is a headache for all internet companies who act as the middle man between two strangers. The fact is, if we were to run stringent checks on all buyers before they could bid (ideas we've had are not allowing new users to place a bid for a week to weed out bogus bidders and carrying out some kind of credit card or bank account check like Paypal do) there is a very real danger that the number of decent bidders will decrease dramatically, thus losing our sellers money. As a direct result of this thread, we have asked tech to find out what percentage of deals struck through Sedo are made by buyers making a bid within 24 hours of setting up an account. I would think it is a high proportion.
I know that many of you who have been affected by bidders and buyers of this kind will be inclined to think we're just trying to find excuses for our own inadequacies. The thing is, we make between 800-1000 successful sales every month and only a small percentage of the sales that go through our system are cancelled. We believe we offer you guys an extremely vibrant market place with thousands upon thousands of happy, successful sellers.
I can only apologise to all of you who have experienced problems of this nature. We hate to see transfers break down. As the contract is between yourselves and the buyers, we have no power to take non-paying buyers to court. If it ever goes that far, however, we provide all evidence we can to support disgruntled sellers - and vice versa if the seller scarpers.
I hope this explains our situation a little more clearly. Email me if you have any more thoughts or questions on the matter at [email protected]
Have a great week and keep an eye out for our new domain management tool coming out this week. Enjoy.

Ed

 

[768768]

Now what? it has been 10 days with that status, and the domain is 'locked' in that I have to hold my end of the agreement, and cant sell it anywhere else. Really sad.

That's ridiculous! I think Sedo could at least change the time allowed for payment. Personally I think 48 hours after an agreement is reached is enough time to arrange payment.

 

[seeker]

*just* received an email from Sedo saying that they had to cancel the transaction because the buyer bought it by mistake . LOL!
They said that If i wanted to pursue it legally, they would offer me all necessary documents.
Go to court for 400 euros? of course not. it's just that more care should be given during the buying time.

 

[Theo]

Get the info, then humiliate them in public.

 

[JuniperPark]

Ed:

First of all, thank you for responding. FYI, I expressed my concerns to my Sedo account mananger before posting here, and only 'went public' when my concerns were not adequately addressed.

I've personally sold nearly 1,000 domain names, some of them via Sedo, so I think I have a good understanding of the business and I have reasonable expectations of Sedo. I fully understand that deadbeat buyers are 'part of the business', and part of the attraction of Sedo is their ability to do SOME screening of buyers.

What I (and other sellers) find completely unacceptable is that Sedo is allowing at least one KNOWN DEADBEAT to continue to bid on names at Sedo. Even worse, your contract and agreements strongly favor the (possibly deadbeat) BUYER. It does NOT take 4 weeks to collect money from a serious buyer. In my experience, 10 days is more than enough time. If a buyer needs more time than that, they should be required to make a NON-REFUNDABLE partial payment within 72 hours to the buyer, PLUS x% of the sale price of the name for taking the name off the market to compensate for lost potential sales.

If you insist on allowing deadbeat bidders, at least WARN the seller give us the option to reject all bids from Deadbeats. Here, I even do the wording for you:
------
ATTENTION SELLER: This Bidder has failed to make payment on bids made to other sellers. Click your chosen option below:

[ ] Accept bid; I'm willing to take my name off the market for 4 weeks and pray for a deadbeat to change his ways.

[ ] Reject bid: Tell bidder to join the con artists on eBay and leave me alone.

 

[seeker]

this is a serious problem that needsw to be addresses.
I understand Sedo's POV, that, it might and will reduce the amount of 'offers', but if the offers are from deadbeats, I prefer NOT to get them.
On the specific domain, I declined another offer because I kept my end of the bargain and thought I was bound by Sedo's agreement.
Now, I get an email that the buyer made an error.
Surely, after so many clicks, how can a buyer make an error???
The demise of pool, and the lurking competition should be a warning to sedo
No one is king in this business.
No one stays on top for too long..