Best Quick Method of Selling?

[jc2]

I've got a medium-value domain name for a long-time established business that just decided to shut it's doors. They want to sell it quick. In general, with pretty much anything you want to sell in life, the best way to get top dollar quickly is an auction sale. I assume this holds true for domain names? Which auction, SEDO?

Also, I noticed on Sedo to get "Premium MLS listing" you need to list a Buy Now price. This seems ridiculous to me as while a minimum selling price may be a good idea, I'd never want to list a Buy Now price since I'm very unsure on it's value which would be determined by the market price it fetches at auction. Would it be beneficial to also just put down an super high (ridiculous) Buy Now price to get the premium MLS or does it not matter if I'm going auction format?

Seems there's more than one auction they run. Is one more appropriate for my situation than another?

Thanks in advance for the insight.

 

[Name Trader]

The best way to sell a domain quickly is to sell it below market value. Which is totally opposite to your desire to get the highest price out of the auction. You also need to promote the auction "to death". You could start here by telling us what the domain is, with a link to the auction at Sedo. A Premium MLS listing, as you rightly note, requires a fixed price. As such, it is not an appropriate for you since you don't know the value of the domain. If it really is a premium domain, a one word dictionary domain, my advice would be to slow down on selling the domain quickly and put it in the next T-R-A-F-F-I-C auction with no reserve, whenever that may be.

 

[jc2]

I found the TRAFFIC website but could find no information anywhere on any upcoming auctions. Can you post a link?

 

[Kate]

A broker might help.
That depends on the domain, and the expected value.

Why do they want to sell 'quick' ? Is this a business that is going to crash or go awol ?
The domain shouldn't be a liability to the new owner. I mean, a bad reputation will diminish or nullify the value of the domain. As said above, "sell quick" and "get top dollar" don't mix well.

 

[johname]

It's all about your domain's quality. "medium-value domain name" is subject to opinion, and the range of price can be so big that "medium" doesn't really mean much.

Quick auctions may be seen only by those that want to sell it to others. In other words you get top reseller dollar.

Might be better off finding your own buyer.

 

[jc2]

Company has a good reputation but Amazon.com has made profit margins for the small-mid size retailer too thin to survive. A more accurate statement would be "sell quick at market value" Their bankruptcy lawyer said they can go ahead and sell their domain ahead of the bankruptcy but they don't want to hang it out there too long and potentially piss off their creditors. Obviously market value is what the market will pay at any given time. You can promote it, then auction it and be done, or promote it and wait and wait and wait for the "best offer" Estibot is valuing it at $8,500 right now but I consider that just a very rough ballpark figure to give an idea of the order of magnitude (4-figures, 5-figures, etc.) that it's most likely in as there are many factors that these auto-appraisals can't consider such as how much revenue this particular retail space that this company was a top seller in produces. In other words, redirecting a domain that is sells $100K worth of $5 items a year is a lot less valuable than redirecting a domain that was selling $5M in a retail space were the average price per unit is $1,000. So that $8,500 is mainly based on domain age and traffic estimates which is just a small part of the picture.

At this point our strategy is as follows:

a) Disable ability to buy products and contact customer service on website and put up For Sale banner. It's a very robust, professional, custom retail site and I think from both a SERP standpoint and potential buyer standpoint, leaving the content up is better than just parking it. Banner will link to auction when we go live.

b) Do some promotion for a week or two. List for sale on GoDaddy, Sedo, and Flippa. Advertise on DNF and NamePros. List on Elliot Silver's Brokerage list, etc. etc. Send e-mails to all possible interested parties in the same retail sub-space.

c) Auction on EBAY. We are Ebay pros, and properly promoted, I don't think Sedo or GoDaddy auctions has an advantage is this is the route we want to take. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Name Trader]

It maybe that there are no scheduled T-R-A-F-F-I-C conferences. I did say that you would need to back off your sell quickly principle. You might be better advised to appoint a domain broker to sell the domain privately, if you want top dollar. I wouldn't even look for any decent domain on either eBay or Flippa. I think Sedo/GoDaddy are much better choices if you want bidders which are in addition to those driven by yourself. Listing on DP or DNF will only attract domainers, imho.

 

[forge]

Auctioning on eBay might just be the worst possible idea if you're looking to achieve anything close to "fair market value".

What kind of traffic did this website/business generate? I'm surprised no one's asked you that yet.

Is it a generic keyword domain? Is it a made up, brandable one? Is it short, maybe 4 letters? For some reason I sense that the Estibot appraisal doesn't bode well for a quick sale, aside from a fire sale.

 

[Name Trader]

So far, from what you've told us, which isn't a whole lot, I fear your plans to auction this domain off as quickly as possible, will not render the best result for the current owner. You might be experts at eBay auctions, but are you experts at eBay Domain auctions? I think your best option would be to get DomainNameSales.com to broker this domain for the owner. Since it is, in your own words, a medium-value domain. They are pretty good at selling these domains at top dollar. If it was a premium domain (a dictionary one word domain), I'd probably go with Sedo as the broker, because they probably have more depth and reach than DNS to sell domains, of that quality. Just IMHO. By using Sedo, I'm not talking about listing it on Sedo, I'm talking about talking to a Sedo broker.

Also I'm uncomfortable with you expecting top dollar in an auction sale unless it is you driving the bidders to the auction site.

 

[jc2]

Stub, your last sentence hits the mark. In the first day of putting a banner on the website, we received 7 offers to buy the domain and we are getting inquiries from past competitors to want to purchase the domain, customer database, backend, etc. This is all BEFORE we listed the domain for sale on Sedo, GoDaddy, and Flippa. So our strategy at this point is in a couple weeks to list the domain on Ebay and by that time I would expect we would have at least 50 potential buyers interested and they can go ahead and bid against each other and we'll see who wants it the most.

A major decision we have now is whether to bundle the customer DB and backend with the domain sale, or just negotiate the sale of those items after the domain is sold as obviously there is a high chance the winner of the domain may be most motivated to offer the highest price. We are firm believers in Ebay fetching market value due to the auction format (as long as there are at least 2 highly motivated buyers which there will be.) So maybe letting people bid on the other items too by bundling it all is the best way to insure we get market value for everything.

BTW, we are using EBAY because since this is not generic names it won't get accepted to Sedo Great Domains auction and GoDaddy has higher commission than E-bay. We just need a platform to allow a competetive bidding process for all the interested business owners.

 

[Kate]

Just a thought:
You say the domain is 'medium-value'. In fact the real value may stem from the traffic, more than the domain itself.
So I think it would be good if you had some traffic stats to show to potential buyers. Of course it doesn't tell us if the traffic will convert well (to sales) but it's better than nothing.
Of course, your direct competitors are probably in the best position to tap and monetize the traffic.