Bido.com closing

This really sucks.

I JUST had an auction close at Bido.

$109. sale and It took me literally ONLY 1 minute of my time to create the auction based on the tools Bido gives us...

Where else can you get that service???
No Friggen-where!

Congrats on the sale!

I just moved all the buying/selling spreadsheets to Google Docs and noticed that since August 2009, I purchased 62 domains for a total of mid $x,xxx and sold 90 domains for a total of high $x,xxx. It's a shame that one of my primary ways of selling domains is about to disappear.

For shame.

cmason said:

Congrats on the sale!

I just moved all the buying/selling spreadsheets to Google Docs and noticed that since August 2009, I purchased 62 domains for a total of mid $x,xxx and sold 90 domains for a total of high $x,xxx. It's a shame that one of my primary ways of selling domains is about to disappear.

For shame.

Click to expand...

Thx CMason,

Yeah, I look at all of my activity over there and I really have to say, we are all losing a VERY valuable resource in the closure of Bido.

Was the system abused? - Absolutely! It was FREE.

Once in a while I wanted to spend some time and play their "vote for profits" game. I would look thru listings and try to test myself on voting on the domains I thought would do well...then as I was perusing their list - BAM! 100 crappy .info's were just listed...so I just moved on.

Anyone who does anything positive for our domain Community, I am a huge fan of. There are sure a lot of great additions that we all need and want but the bottom line is money.

Not sure of my point, just rambling here but I'm a little bummed.

I sold $xxxx on Bido. My second best source for sales. Thanks guys!

Customer Service was top-notch. I didn't think the business model was sustainable (and told them so) at the $28 starting price, but they certainly developed a good auction model and a lot of data for someone to pick it up.

There are some good ideas here for paid membership, listing fees, etc. Hopefully someone will continue to evolve what Bido started.

Oh well, back to getting low-balled on forums, lol.

This is sad news. Bido wasn't one of the big domain auction sites but it was one of the few nevertheless.

Lot's of effort, time and money goes into creating these projects and Bido was one of the good sites with user friendly features. I wish they wouldn't just close down. There must be some good reason why they decided to do so.

I only sold 1 domain and bought 1 domain there but I gotta say both were complete within hours which is rare when using someone else for sales as I have had deals take 6+ weeks at other markets that let buyers take their time paying. Lot of crap to sort through but wasn't really that hard to do as they sent a daily email with their auctions that just took a quick scan to make sure a gem wasn't hiding. I think my only complaint was seeing obvious trademarks occasionally in the daily email which should have been plucked out to keep it clean. If you look at any days sales Bido.com - Domain Name Auctions and subtract their commission for a day you can see not really enough to pay a staff. Unfortunate as I think with a little pruning and end user marketing it could have developed into a good market as their customer service was flawless. Be nice if they let all auctions already voted in with auction dates complete but doesn't sound like that will happen. Sad day for Bido as some good guys/service behind it.

I think Bido could survive and become profitable if they retooled their business model a bit.

To start with they need a way to weed out the garbage. Quality domains at reasonable prices bring buyers. I knew at one point quad premium LLLL.com were going for under $100 at times on Bido. I would have happily paid that for them but Bido is just too tedious to go through the crap.

Overall BIDO is just too flooded with low quality domains. There is no benefit to BIDO as the vast majority do not sell. It is just a waste of space taking up resources.

If there was some kind of modest fee, either membership or per auction, it would help to improve the quality as well.

Brad

I am a big fan of Bido, and their customer service was one of the best in the industry.
But honestly, i am very dissapointed by their move now. They announced closing of Bido less than 24 hours before they plan to close it? Thats not right, and thats not fair for sure.
I had several PreBids for my auction which i set yesterday for tomorrow, and i believe i would achive BidoPrice of almoust $1k.
But that is not the only reason. When some holiday was coming, they announced that Bido will not work on that day few days ago. And now they close their service and publish that info less than 24 hours before end. Really not nice.

Like i wrote, i liked Bido very much, but now i dont know what to think about this kind of behaviour.

Brad,
Thats exactly what I said in my post #38.



Most of us would be happy to pay for that service, and sales platform, ok we've established that.

So, they already have the reputation, traffic, brand, etc...

Who wants to join me and buy Bido?

We get rid of all that cool but yet VERY confusing stuff, (Vote for profits, Bido Quotes, Affiliate Program, etc. etc. etc.)

We concentrate on ONLY domain sales, and we kick Sedo's ($50.00 minimum) A$$ ???


.

the dot stop said:

Brad,
Thats exactly what I said in my post #38.



Most of us would be happy to pay for that service, and sales platform, ok we've established that.

So, they already have the reputation, traffic, brand, etc...

Who wants to join me and buy Bido?

We get rid of all that cool but yet VERY confusing stuff, (Vote for profits, Bido Quotes, Affiliate Program, etc. etc. etc.)

We concentrate on ONLY domain sales, and we kick Sedo's ($50.00 minimum) A$$ ???


.

Click to expand...

I actually wouldn't mind the job of auction pruner for a month where I can hit delete on any auctions of obvious trademarks and domains with zero end user potential along with a small end user advertising budget. Would be curious to see if a month of pruning for quality helps. Would probably dump the vote for profits and bido quotes as good inventory sells itself without needing to describe it. I think the affiliate program is useful though as sellers linking to their auctions is targeted publicity.

Wonder if latonas put the pressure on them, they have been selling alot of domains in an auction sort of format every single day a new lot of auctions... I see alot of sellers not to many buyers?

They gave this a red hot go but I doubt the economics of it were anywhere near close to working. The seemed to be selling maybe $5000-$7000 worth of names a week? (just roughly). So with an 8% commission I think it would barely pay for one member of staff let alone many. The selling prices were just too low to run it as is. I think a sales site need to have higher quality names aswell (easier said than done) or some element of enduser sales.

If the sellers and buyers are both domainers it looks very difficult to run a successful auction site. Namejet, snapnames and godaddy are successful as auction sites but they mainly sell expiring domains to domainers. Sedo is successful but they do a lot of end user sales. So for bido to be successful, there were a few things they could have done:

They could make a deal with smaller registrars and auction their expiring domains.

They could sell to end users. To do this you need many additional features. For instance you need fixed price domains that can be bought immediately. To make this work you also need to run a parking service like sedo. Otherwise no matter what you try, it won't work. The end users open the domain directly and they want to click a button and buy the domain on the spot. You would also need to provide things like multi language support because not all end users speak English and there are a lot of non-English domains to sell.

If Bido could provide a better parking service than sedo, a faster transaction than sedo (which they already do), a more covering multi-language support than sedo, they could have succeed.

For instance sedo doesn't categorise domains according language, which is a big problem if you are only interested in domains in a particular language.

So I would say, fixed price sales, domain parking, multi language website, expiring domains from smaller partner registrars, domains categorised according language would be the way to go. It's a shame they decided to close down.

Erdinc said:

If the sellers and buyers are both domainers it looks very difficult to run a successful auction site.

Namejet, snapnames and godaddy are successful as an auction sites but they mainly sell expiring domains to domainers. Sedo is successful but they mainly sell to end users.

So for bido to be successful, there are two ways to go:

a. Make a deal with smaller registrars and auction their expiring domains.

b. Sell to end users. To do this you need many additional features. For instance you need fixed price domains that can be bought immediately. To make this work you also need to run a parking service like sedo. Otherwise no matter what you try, it not going to work.

The end users open the domain directly and they want to click a button and buy the domain on the spot. You would also need to provide things like multi language support because there are many end users who don't speak English and there are a lot of non-English domains to sell.

If Bido could provide a better parking service than sedo, a faster transaction than sedo (which they already do), a more covering multi-language support than sedo. They would succeed.

For instance sedo doesn't categorise domains according language, which is a big problem if you are only interested in domains in a particular language.

So I would say, fixed price sales, domain parking, multi language website, expiring domains from smaller partner registrars, domains categorised according language would be the way to go. It's a shame they decided to close down.

Click to expand...

Your ideas for a successful auction house are nothing short of Brilliant.
BUT, all of those ideas take time and money which (I'm speculating here) is not online with their current situation...No Money =firing everyone, and that means less people working there, so a lot less Time.

Bido's daily/weekly changes were out of this World! I commend them for reaching for the sky! Think about it, Voting for profits...Amazing Idea, software, etc., Their Bido Quote Program, The Voting Power idea, All truly incredible, and much bigger than any auction house has ever thought of, but seriously how much time and money (people) did it take to make those programs work? I bet hundreds of thousands of $$$.

So, ya go back to the basics, Sell Domains, and make money. Charge up-front somehow, some way...as you make money from the simplicity of being a reputable domain auction house (which they have established that already), then you slowly re-invest and add one program at a time.

SpareDomains said:

I actually wouldn't mind the job of auction pruner for a month where I can hit delete on any auctions of obvious trademarks and domains with zero end user potential along with a small end user advertising budget. Would be curious to see if a month of pruning for quality helps. Would probably dump the vote for profits and bido quotes as good inventory sells itself without needing to describe it. I think the affiliate program is useful though as sellers linking to their auctions is targeted publicity.

Click to expand...

Great idea.
This would draw serious buyers and sellers in itself.


.

It is bad news, I have made a good profit there in the last 2 months, any way I am trying now epik.com and they are good too.

What is sad is the fact that there are smart and creative people behind Bido and I really wanted to see them succeed. Their website is user friendly and cool.

It certainly cost a lot of money adding unique features to your website but it takes more than that. Usually there are people behind the scenes who are obsessed with minor details and looking at the nice ajax features on the site I can see all the hard work that went into creating them. I agree that some of them, things like vote for profit, were not needed.

A few weeks ago we exchanged some emails with Jarred about some technical things. To me he seemed like a smart and hardworking person who is dedicated to this project. I'm sure it is a very sad time for them as well.

Bido was a strong candidate to be a smaller but much better version of sedo. I wish this story didn't end like that.

Erdinc said:

I wish this story didn't end like that.

Click to expand...

The story should end like this...

Auction House on Auction at Auction House!

Jarred and Co-owners choose an auction house to sell their Auction House.

Bido.com on auction at Sedo

Bido.com on auction at EBay.

or how about this...
after all of the Press they will have today, tommorow, and the coming weeks ahead, you have a Press conference, and hit every Blog/Forum/News Site and you promote Bido re-opening for just one more day.
for 1 sale only...

Bido.com on aution at Bido.com!

then you and I, and a few others buy it, hire Jarred, and Garret back, and take down Sedo first, then eBay!

Opportunities are endless...


Damn, now I have to change al of my NameServers on hundreds of domains...:lol:


.

the dot stop said:

The story should end like this...

Auction House on Auction at Auction House!

Jarred and Co-owners choose an auction house to sell their Auction House.

Bido.com on aution at Sedo

Bido.com on aution at EBay.

or how about this...
after all of the Press they will have today, tommorow, and the coming weeks ahead, you have a Press conference, and hit every Blog/Forum/News Site and you promote Bido re-opening for just one more day.
for 1 sale only...

Bido.com on aution at Bido.com!

then you and I, and a few others buy it, hire Jarred, and Garret back, and take down Sedo first, then eBay!

Opportunities are endless...


Damn, now I have to change al of my NameServers on hundreds of domains...:lol:


.

Click to expand...

They might as well sell of the name (or the whole site), maybe they will.

snoop said:

They might as well sell of the name (or the whole site), maybe they will.

Click to expand...

Both name and network dont just compliment each other, they are a must to keep together.

Each on their own are definitely valuable but seriously,
The entire package together, their domain name, Hosting Service, Software, etc. are priceless.


.

According to Sahar's blog the site is for sale.


Frank