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Would You Buy A Domain On Flippa?

Nazz

Member
After seeing that Rythmn's recent success selling an AU domain on Flippa (sold healthinsurance.net.au for $3800) I had a look as saw that in the last 30 days there have actually been a few AU domains auctioned off on Flippa:

HealthInsurance.net.au - USD$3067
Seed.com.au - USD$2001
Public-Liability-Insurance.com.au - USD$900
Twobirds.com.au - USD$200
Disappear.com.au - USD$31

It got me wondering if other people here would be willing to buy a domain on Flippa?

Does anyone here currently keep an eye on Flippa domain auctions and actively bids?

Or are there any reasons why people don't like bidding/buying domains on Flippa?



Flippa is currently making a lot of changes to their domain sector, and I must say, it is working to their advantage in terms of inviting domainers to sell on their platform.

Though keep in mind, its seems to be domainers buying from domainers..
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
Flippa is currently making a lot of changes to their domain sector, and I must say, it is working to their advantage in terms of inviting domainers to sell on their platform.

Though keep in mind, its seems to be domainers buying from domainers..
Indeed I think that's the leap they need to make - make it easier for end users and developers to acquire domains.

That's why things like automated alerts, shorter auction extension times as well as a better onsite browsing experience with good search functionality are important.
 

James

Top Contributor
I have purchased and sold websites on Flippa over the years, I have never sold/purchased a domain via it tho. I remember even selling a website on SitePoint Marketplace back in 2007 before it was even called Flippa.

I do get these "domain name" updates from Flippa and a good friend of mine in the space check names out daily on Flippa.
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
The other thing about building a liquid marketplace is making sure that "transactions" are as seemless as possible.

So I think Flippa getting involved in the Escrow process is a step in the right direction and my understanding is that they are also considering becoming a domain registrar to make the transfer process of domains even more efficient.

It might be a step too far at this point, but I think it would be nice to also see Flippa get involved in the website hosting side of things to give buyers more confidence that the transfer process would be seemless...

I would suspect domains/websites hosted with Flippa would attract premium bids.

And I hope it wouldn't be too far off into the future where websites (like domains) might be permanent listed for sale in a catalogue on a Flippa directory.
 

snoopy

Top Contributor
Recent success? That name should have had a few extra zeros.

The .net.au market has collapsed in the last 3 years, down 90%+ since Google's exact match changes. The price paid is about right in my view, I think the top of the tree in an auction situation for a .net.au is around $3000.
 

James

Top Contributor
Tried to list a domain on flippa today this verification thing is pretty annoying I will admit.
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
Interested to hear what you and others think is a good extension time, currently its an hour which can be a fairly long time when multiple people are bidding at the end of an auction.
Would it be a big deal if sellers got to set their own extension times?

It may depend on the domain (ie bigger ticket domains - ie $25,000+ might need to be longer), but my gut says that shorter is better (ie 1 minute max - but I reckon this would definitely be something to split test - I wouldn't be surprised if something more like 15 seconds was most effective).

For me I think there is far less due diligence required on a domain than there is on a website and they tend to sell for less (because they have no revenues) so I'm not so sure that long extension periods are necessary.

My thinking is that if you want to extract an extra bid out of someone you don't want them to think "rationally" you want them to bid while they are "in the moment" and in the midst of a bidding war.

So I suspect that the more "rushed" a bidder feels the more likely they are to let the "fear of missing out" or "being beaten by a competitor" drive them to bid again. Given enough time bidders might opt to act more rationally and step back from the auction.

And I think the more bids someone makes the more committed they will become to winning the auction yet I don't think people are going to wait for an hour to engage in an emotional bidding war.

I'm no expert in the psychology of maximising auction results, but I would think that you want auctions to end with a flurry of bids. I feel like watching auctions should almost be entertainment in itself...

I see domain auctions being no different to property auctions, often you'll have 40 people turn up to the auction but only 4 or 5 people are really there to bid the rest are just watching, but the 35 that didn't bid are probably still going to be talking about it with their friends at the dinner party that night (which is good word of mouth marketing).

...but how many of those non-bidders would you expect to hang around to the end of the property auction if there was an hour between bids.

Back in the old NetFleet auction days (it's now a blind tender) I'd go to the site every day at 1pm (when the auctions finished) even when I wasn't bidding for no other reason than I enjoyed watching the flurry of bids for the big ticket domains that were up for sale and I just wanted to know what was happening in the industry.

I feel like Flippa should be trying to create a similar environment where people can visit the site at certain times every day and know that there is almost certainly going to be some fireworks. I'm not saying you should "force" people to set the auction times to conclude at the exact same time everyday, but I think it should be "encouraged" to conclude them at certain times and maybe even on certain days because that's when most people would be on the site.

Ie if it was understood that 95% of domain auctions finished at either:

8AM Tuesday, 2pm Wednesday or 8pm Thursday and the industry came to expect that there would be at least 50 - 100 "no reserve" or "reserve met" domains concluding at these times each week (and each bid only extended the auction by 1 minute) I think I'd make it part of my daily/weekly ritual to jump on Flippa at those times.

At the moment auction finishing times are quite random which makes it hard for a domainer to lock Flippa into their weekly schedule.
 

James

Top Contributor
What's your username? I can look into it for you.
Connections is the user name I already paid for the listing tho the name is not live, the whole TXT verification thing is a bit annoying on AU names, seems they just match who is data for global domains with your account info.
 
It's now verified - you'll just need to jump onto the listing and hit 'finish editing' which will automatically launch it.
the whole TXT verification thing is a bit annoying on AU names
Completely agree!! - ccTLD's, specifically .au make it more difficult for us to use email as method to verify ownership however we are working on a few options to improve this. As a side note the TXT verification we have in place seems to be acting up in the last 24-48 hours - happy to help anyone else who hits issues, just drop an email to alex.lunnon@flippa.com
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
Completely agree!! - ccTLD's, specifically .au make it more difficult for us to use email as method to verify ownership however we are working on a few options to improve this.
Now that you offer domain parking pages, what do you guys think of making one the verification options a "nameservers change" to Flippa parking service (which, whilst slow, is easy enough most of the time to do in bulk).

I feel this adequately demonstrates that the user has control over the domain.

Then if users want to change the nameservers back after verification they can, and if they can't be bothered changing back then it's even better for Flippa as they'll have also obtained some new domain parking clients in the process.

;)
 
Now that you offer domain parking pages, what do you guys think of making one the verification options a "nameservers change" to Flippa parking service (which, whilst slow, is easy enough most of the time to do in bulk).
;)

This is my personal favourite - we need to work through some of the finer details though - for example how do we tie a domain back to it's owner's account - take for example 'domain.com' is a draft listed on multiple accounts - the owner changes the nameserver - now any of those draft listings could be verified by multiple users.
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
This is my personal favourite - we need to work through some of the finer details though - for example how do we tie a domain back to it's owner's account - take for example 'domain.com' is a draft listed on multiple accounts - the owner changes the nameserver - now any of those draft listings could be verified by multiple users.
Good question.

The short answer is I am not sure of the best solution, but I am confident it's a solvable problem.

My first thoughts are, it would only be a problem for 1% of domains.

You could potential have the approval process come up as an error when two or more people have a domain in their catalogs at which point a second form of verification may be required (probably the simplest solution), alternatively Flippa could create a couple dozen unique nameservers and each Flippa account would be randomly be assigned a nameserver (eg instead of pointing all domains to ns1.flippa.com, Flippa might have nameservers 1 - 50, so that if 5 people have domain.com on their account the person who changes the domain's nameservers to the one linked on their account (eg ns38.flippa.com) is obviously the real owner) or when duplicates are identified Flippa could do a manual approval, which might not be a major issue if it's a problem that occurs less than 1% of the time.

Just a couple of ideas, but I'm sure you guys at Flippa would have some good ideas of your own.

Might be interesting to do a quick scan of your database to see how many duplicate domains there are presently, this might highlight how big the problem is (or might be).
 

Honan

Top Contributor
I changed the DNS to flippa expecting I would get a cool auction page.
i got a cool sales page.
No mention that the auction has reached reserve and finishes in 60 hours
Take a look
www.divested.com
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
I changed the DNS to flippa expecting I would get a cool auction page.
i got a cool sales page.
No mention that the auction has reached reserve and finishes in 60 hours
Take a look
www.divested.com
The domain actually redirects to Flippa auctions now... I assume that is because the auction is over.

Though I do remember going to divested.com a few days ago and I saw what you were talking about. From memory all I saw was the parking page change to reflect the new minimum (which was $800 odd) given that the domain was at auction and that's what the bidding was up to.

So I agree that Flippa could to tweak those parked pages a bit for when a domain is in the process of being auctioned.

Are you planning upgrades like this @Alex Lunnon (Flippa.com)?
 
I assume that is because the auction is over.

Yep - this is something we are working on at the moment - when the parking page fires up different things can happen:

Open Listing -
We find an open listing and display a page with the pricing, sales copy based on domain traits and other open domains by the seller

Unsold, Sold, Cancelled Listing -
If we find a domain thats no longer open we currently redirect to flippa.com however the goal here is to show it as 'Sold' or 'Unsold' (the real goal is to transition auctions back into your Flippa portfolio) and promote other domains for sale by the seller

No Listing
- Currently in this circumstance we redirect to flippa.com however will be optimizing a page to display in the event the domain isn't on the Flippa platform.
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
Just saw that the Vision.com.au flippa auction ended at $3500 USD (I'm surprised that a $3500 bid didn't breach the reserve).

Nonetheless I think that's a pretty solid result - I doubt it would have achieved $3500 on a NetFleet auction. Thoughts?

@Honan, what were your thoughts on your divested.com result?
 

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