Maintaining the dual roles of domain buyer and domain seller, is not an easy task.
One has to juggle between these two roles – rolled together into the joint function of “domain investor” – and keep an objective approach to business.
As a domain seller, whenever I offer domains for sale on various venues, if I use a public reserve price it is the actual minimum price I’d consider selling at.
This approach helps indicate what range of offers one expects, and allows serious buyers to surpass it if they are so inclined. In fact, this approach leads to a sale quicker, than with a “make an offer” statement.
At the antipodes of this, is the use of a pseudo-reserve price, often utilized by domain selling venues. Personally, I’ve seen it on Sedo, and it works like this:
The domain is parked with a “Make an offer” option that carries a price, that in no way reflects the selling point of the owner. In fact, the minimum acceptable price is set considerably low, in order to act as a bait; the seller can then accept (unlikely) or counter-offer much higher.
As a domain buyer, I find this method to be frustrating and borderline dishonest, particularly as it engages buyer and seller over a domain that would have been sold otherwise. I’m not sure if this method is used solely by Sedo to generate traffic to domains for sale, or by other venues as well.
The bottom line is, that for me, it acted as a deterrent and I ended up purchasing a different domain name.
You nailed it! It is very frustrating especially since they put it in small writing. I actually spoke to one of their brokers, and he couldn’t understand why it seems wrong. When I go into a store to buy a product or go and buy something online, I assume the price written is the price and not a “recommended price”. If its not binding then don’t set a price. But if you still want to annoy people then at a minimum, put it in bold that this is only a suggested price that can go up. This is also what give this industry a lousy name!
Years ago I put $100 minimums on SEDO & Afternic listings regardless of what my target price was. Of course that invited many $100 offers even when I had no interest in selling low $xxx. So eventually I moved to fixed price listings on over 90% of my portfolio. Periodically I will review pricing and make adjustments. But yes, on SEDO it is common to have 150-200 domains monthly with offer page views. I suppose many of those are domain investors attempting to submit offers well below the list price. Perhaps a few are limited budget end users who just don’t want to pay the price we are targeting (even though my portfolio median pricepoint is below $1000). So what is the best approach?
Spot on – Good to see I’m not the only one irked by this 😀 It’s evident that the Sedo approach is influenced by some freaky-dicky-dutch approach to business, where numbers aren’t really indicative of what they’re supposed to be.
Leonard – Hence the issue of being both a seller and a buyer, one has to leverage both standpoints without bias. 🙂 As much as I detest lowball offers as a seller, this method here does not accomplish sales when I’m the buyer. The best approach is to either set a BIN, or define the reserve as truly the minimum price you’d sell at.