A Sedo broker or a McDonalds burger flipper? Your choice of employment!

As I am multi-tasking away in the 25th hour of the day at my computer, my email notification “dings”; is it yet another Viagra spam or an offer from an automated user of the DRT software?

I take a sip from my Gatorade bottle – lemonade flavor is my new favorite – and I switch over to Eudora. No Outlook for me, thanks. I’ve been using Eudora since I got away from Mail and Pine, both residing in the heart of the then Unix – now Linux – operating system. That was 15 years ago; if Eudora were a teenager, she’d be looking like Miley Cyrus by now.

I delete a few obvious spam emails that somehow made it through the server’s firewall and the spam filter; the Hoodia peddlers are getting craftier these days. I scroll down to what appears to be a series of messages from eNom, a reminder for tomorrow’s meeting and…an offer from Sedo.

A click later, the subject line seems to contradict the domain referred to in the message itself. But, we’re all human and make mistakes: Matt at Sedo is a nice guy that I’ve talked to on the phone a few times. Very polite, easy to relay my concerns to. He’s now trying to broker through an offer for a domain that I own.

I gawk at the amount. It’s $2,200 – for a domain that Sedo themselves recently appraised at more than $5,000. What the fuck is going on???

Flashback time.

The same domain of mine has been getting a lot of inquiries recently. Some come from anonymous cowards that attempt to exploit their apparent advantage of hiding behind an offer with no signature. Like that guy from Norway who made a $60 offer, then accepted my $75,000 counter-offer, only to conveniently claim it was accidental, two days later.

Whatever, bitch.

I don’t get worked up much, unless shit like this happens, when a company that wants to be taken seriously, such as Sedo, fucks up in their own modus operandi.

More flashbacks.

After that $75k “deal” was annulled faster than Britney Spears’ first wedding (poor chick, she has a nice ass but no brains) I received a direct offer in my email. A few email exchanges later, I was talking on the phone with a potential buyer; to whom I mentioned my firm asking price of mid 5-figures.

The potential buyer then pulled back, to discuss their options. Fair enough.

A week later they emailed me, with a double-whammy: an offer within 10% of my asking price (a winner, in my book) and a paid appraisal from Sedo. Curious as I am, I opened the Sedo Adobe PDF; only to almost piss myself.

OK, I’ve been in the domain business since February 1997, that’s when I bought my first domain. Even back then, I would not be as clueless in order to valuate domains based on some random jumbling up of similar words in comparable sales.

Each domain is different; it has its own features and characteristics beyond the traffic and revenue it might be generating. There is also the age factor; in my book, a 10 year old domain tips the virtual scales more than a 2 year old.

Sedo’s appraisal was such a joke that poor old Matt heard me getting all frothy and furious on the phone, unlike other times. I’m a nice guy – I don’t cuss, unless someone pokes me hard in the eye. I don’t punch, unless someone tries to grab my ass.

First of all WHAT IN THE G-D DAMN sake does Sedo think, when they offer $39 appraisals to Joe Blow, for a domain they don’t own, which is actively parked and brokered through Sedo themselves? When that very same Joe Blow comes to me – all smirking – with an appraisal from Sedo and shoves it down my throat, saying “This is how much your domain is worth, this is how much I will be paying” – what can I say back, when I am using the very same broker, Sedo, in order to commence a profitable sale?

I don’t know what I said to Matt, I was seeing red during my conversation. My voice was spewing dragon breath, not mint and niceties.

So, I’ll say it again: STOP UNDERCUTTING us, Sedo. Stop offering domain appraisals, as if you were GoDaddy or Network Solutions or Jim Bob’s Domain Appraisal Store on eBay. Think for a second what it’s costing us, the seller that uses your services, then think what it’d cost you – the broker – in lost fees. Your brokers and valuators just plain SUCK ASS.

This time, I took two mid-5-figures sales outside of Sedo.

Sorry, but although I like the efficiency of their process, I have had it, man! I don’t want the kind of shit that creates more problems than solves. I am tired of being told by morons, that Sedo appraised my domain at $5k, then receive brokered offers for half as much! Jesus f-cking Christ! Does Sedo keep track of a domain’s history in their German databases? I thought Germans were organized, all the way down to the fall of the Berlin wall.

Enough of this.

In two weeks’ time, I will be seating my ass on a fat “wallet” and maintaining a stronger relationship with domain outlets such as Escrow.com, Moniker and AfterNIC. Too many slip-ups by Sedo and there is always the proverbial straw that somehow broke the camel’s back.

I said camel’s, not camelto.es