PushToAuction.com
By Michael Sumner • Feb 8th, 2009 • Category: Web DevelopmentOn May 8th, 2008 DN Media Corporation launched PushToAuction.com, which is a site for domain name investors to list domains that they would be willing to push to auction at Sedo for $60. There is no question that Sedo is the premier marketplace for selling domain names, and getting a domain into an auction there is a big win for sellers. There are three ways to get your domain name into auction at Sedo: apply for their premium auction (GreatDomains), contact a broker and ask him to start a no-reserve auction, or to receive an offer and then push to auction. The first two require a premium domain and a manual approval process that often takes weeks and is quite selective. The third option is difficult as well because Sedo has more than 11.5 million domain names listed on their platform with tens of thousands of new domains added daily. It is easy for even the best domain names to get lost in the crowd. That is where PushToAuction.com comes in.
The idea behind the site is simple: list domains that you are willing to push to auction at Sedo for the minimum bid, and let the market decide the price. For sellers, this means increased visibility for your listing. At the time of this post there are less than 4,000 domains listed on PushToAuction.com compared to 11.5 million on Sedo. With more eyes on your domain instead of someone else’s, and with the buyers understanding that you will start an auction if a $60 bid is received, your chances of getting that initial offer allowing you to push to auction are increased dramatically. The real goal in all this is to get in Sedo’s auction list which has huge visibility, and your domain will most likely sell at or above fair market value.
The draw for buyers isn’t quite as obvious, but is equally enticing. For the eternal optimist, there is the hope that the auction will go relatively (or completely) unnoticed, and you will win the domain for $60 or slightly more. However, the site also saves buyers time. A major caveat to using Sedo as a buyer is that you could make reasonable offers all day long and not end up purchasing a single domain name because unrealistic sellers keep countering you with $100,000 offers. Lets say you have $300 to invest this week and you are determined to buy a three-character .com (CCC.com). You could perform a search on Sedo, spend hours making 50+ offers, and you will probably end up with nothing to show for it. Or you could do what the shrewd buyers do and pay a visit to PushToAuction.com, click on the “Acronyms” category, choose your favorite CCC.com and make a single $60 offer. Seven days later the auction will end and you’ll most likely own your new domain at fair market value.
The site immediately received a lot of interest as this is a genuine need of domain investors that had gone un-served. Before PushToAuction.com, if a domain owner wanted to get their domain pushed to auction, they would have to rely on unethical tactics like asking friends or family, people who were not interested in following through with the purchase, to make an offer on their domain. The only other choice was to wait… and wait… and wait some more. Now they had a way to quickly find a qualified buyer, and they loved it. Just two months after we launched the site, the popular domain industry news source DomainNameWire.com did a story on the site (and recently did a follow-up story) that was syndicated on thousands of industry blogs. Several months later, Domaining.com gave the site its “recommended” award under the “Tools” category.
Soon after PushToAuction.com went live we worked closely with Sedo’s North American risk management coordinator, Tom Fell, to monitor auctions started by the site’s users. He was unable to find any correlation between auctions started from our site and an increase in canceled sales, thus confirming our site was generating solid leads.
At the time of this post, PushToAuction.com has helped start 447 auctions of which 435 have completed (12 are still running), resulting in $129,114 in gross sales for users of the site. The current record holder for the highest sale price using our site is Bid.info which pulled in an impressive $2,350 at the no-reserve auction. These stats are updated live on the right-hand column of every page.
Update: For the past few weeks there has been grumblings around the forums from Sedo reps that using the site was against Sedo’s TOS and users risked having their accounts closed. I took this issue all the way to the top, and got clearence from Sedo’s Cheif Operating Officer and General Counsel Jeremiah Johnston to keep running the site. He acknowledged that it was not against Sedo’s TOS, and that PushToAuction.com was in fact generating solid sales leads (as I had already confirmed with Tom Fell). The only stipulation was that it remain clear that PushToAuction.com is not owned, operated, or endorsed by Sedo, and that buyers should only make offers if they intend to follow through with the sale.
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Michael Sumner
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Michael,
You’ve given some real credibility to your PushToAuction service with this blog post.
I just looked through the site and see that domains that are regular listings are listed until “PushedToAuction”.
Since it’s free to add a domain to the regular list, how do you keep the site from being bogged down
with junk domains that won’t even get the minimum $60 bid?
If you don’t mind I’d also like to make a suggestion.
I think it would be good if on the submission form there is a reminder that submitted domains should
be parked at Sedo so the $50 minimum Sedo commission is waived and the standard 10% will apply.
This is true for US members. I don’t know about the other countries.
@Patrick – Thanks for the compliment and suggestion, we have added the message to the submission guidelines. In regards to keeping junk domains off of the site, the main way we did that was to not allow bulk submissions despite numerous requests to add that feature. The more time it takes to add a listing, the more you will think about whether or not it is worth submitting.
We also added in the sorting of listings by the date they were submitted, with the most recent first. That way all new submissions get the same visibility, and the good ones will get offers while the bad ones get buried. The farther you go back in the results pages, the longer the domains have been sitting on the site without getting bids, which is a major indicator of quality.
Roughly 11% of submissions were pushed to auction, which means a lot of junk is being submitted. However, we don’t want to be in a position to approve or reject listings for two reasons. The first is that a lot of domains have been pushed to auction and done well that most would agree were not worth $60 in the reseller market, and we don’t want to stop those sales from happening. Another is the deluge of emails we would receive from visitors asking why their listing wasn’t approved, which would only end in resentment and time wasted since it is subjective.
We thought about adding voting, but will give that further consideration once the site gains more traction.
Michael,
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
I look forward to participating…hopefully with not too many junk domains.
Michael,
I hope you don’t mind that I want to offer another suggestion.
I was thinking over your response above how you try to prevent junk domains
from taking over the site.
It dawned on me there is another ,even greater problem, and that is ‘dead’ domains.
By dead domains I mean those domains that eventually expire but are still listed on the site.
I’d like to suggest that all domains only be listed for X period of time.
Then they would have to be re-listed to get back in.
Forgive me if you’ve already addressed this problem.
We have software that we run from time to time that checks every domain listed on the site to see if it is still on Sedo. However, in between runs there will still be some dead listings, and that still doesn’t address the problem of domains selling outside of auctions. They could either not be deleted from the seller’s Sedo account, or the buyer could re-list it on Sedo without any intention to push it to auction. Our solution obviously wouldn’t catch either of those situations happening unless we cached the WHOIS information and de-listed domains where the WHOIS changed.
I think we’re going to implement your suggestion once the number of listings on the site is high enough that it isn’t practical to check them all at Sedo. I would appreciate input from you and others as to what amount of time would be reasonable for a listing to stay active. I don’t want to make it too short where it becomes a burden for sellers, but I don’t want to make it too long where the data is no longer relevant.
The only other option I can think of is adding a button to report a dead listing, but I’d prefer to not pass that burden onto the buyers.
Hi, Michael,
The problem with running software to see if the domains are still listed on Sedo is that Sedo does not
currently have any system in place to check the domains in their marketplace that have expired or are
under new ownership.
As you know you can list domains for sale on Sedo without using Sedo nameservers so a nameserver
check would not be particularly effective.
Regarding checking WhoIs, don’t some of the Registrars make it difficult to find out the actual Registrant info?
I had a problem every time I listed a domain at Sedo that I had registered at Name.com and was not using Sedo nameservers.
Sedo wasn’t able to confirm my ownership. I’d have to “prove” I was the Registrant.
What if the Registrant is using WhoIs Privacy.
Limiting the time domains are listed would also help the “junk” domain problem I suspect.
Since listing domains at PushToAuction is free , taking the time to re-list your domains is a small price
to pay and can only serve to help the Marketplace.
The less junk, the less clutter , the better for both Buyers and Sellers.
I think re-listing domains quarterly is reasonable. Not too short, not too long.
The button idea would also be good in addition so dead domains can be reported and removed before
the de-listing date.
I don’t think the button would be a burden in any way.
Many people are glad to help but no one is forced to.
I (sadly) am not a techie and don’t know how to build sites like you do but I wonder
if listing the domain’s expiration date when the domains aresubmitted could be used in any way
to help with this matter.
Your suggestion definitely seems like the way to go as it solves the dead listing problem and the junk problem, all without creating too much of a burden on site users and eliminating overhead on our end. I guess we would also need to notify users via email when their listing reached the three-month limit and expired.
I’m going to get this rolled out shortly, and I’ll post another comment here when it is done. Thanks for your input Patrick, it is very helpful.
If anyone else wants to weigh in on how long a listing should be live before it expires, please feel free to do so. Also, any other comments/suggestions are welcome.
Michael,
Last night I submitted 2 domains at PushToAuction and they are listed.
Thanks.
Since no one is (currently) required to create an account on PushToAuction, I was wondering
how submitted domains can be removed.
I was just going thru the PushToAuction site again and don’t see any way to do that.
Making it easy for the submitter to remove domains would help in keeping the Marketplace clean.
P.S. Let me know if I’m becoming a pain.
Currently people just email me when they want to remove a listing, and they have to send it from the account that they entered when they added the listing. However, we’re working on an automated system so a user can fill out a form to request removal, and it will email a link to the account they used when adding the listing. Clicking that link will remove the domain from the database. I’ll post when that is complete as well.
You’re not a pain, I appreciate the input. I’m always looking for ways to improve the site, and you’ve come up with some great ideas.
Michael,
You do something very nice on PushToAuction and that is allowing domains submitted to have Capitalized Keywords.
It makes it so much easier and a lot less effort to read through a long list of domains that look like PushToAuction.com
instead of pushtoauction.com.
Now if you can only get SEDO to follow suit.
At the risk of being a pain again, it might be nice to mention that this option is available on the submission page.
I’d bet a lot of your users don’t know they can use Capitals especially since SEDO doesn’t.