Beware of Sedo - unprofessional

[jimba]

Careful with this company - if you win an auction, don't celebrate - they sometimes take it off you a day or so later!

I won an LLL.com auction on Sedo last week for mid $000 sum. Plenty of action in the last hour of the auction with me and one other party bidding up at the last minute, extending the auction several times.

Paid the invoice via bank transfer.

I get an email 27 hours after the auction win time from Great Domains (their other division) in the US telling me that apparently some of their auctions experienced technical errors that day and that my winning domain was one of them.

Sedo are to 're-run all auctions that were affected by this error'.

WHAT???

It was obvious the bidding for this auction was going quite smoothly, by the way the bids moved. I find it incredibly hard to believe this auction 'stuck' going into its 4th extended period. I could feel the other party were going to hold off as the auction moved into its final stage, everything moved very naturally.

In any case, Sedo have provided no evidence of this last second 'break-down' nor acknowledged my inconvenience. Not to mention my lost bank transfer charges from UK to Germany.

There is nothing in their Terms and Conditions or Conditions of Sale about re-running auctions.

I am sure GreatDomains were simply annoyed the auction didn't achieve a high enough sale price and an 'incident' facilitating a re-run (next month after the UK holiday period!) is quite handy from their P&L perspective.

What a sloppy situation and bad customer service.

Think twice about using these people to buy or sell domains.

 

[DylanButler]

Interesting to find this when placing a bid on an auction name at sedo:

Provisional Contract: Please note that this document is not yet legally binding, as no agreement has been reached between the buyer and seller. Once an agreement has been reached this document will become binding. This document should therefore be treated as a sample of the post-agreement contract.

Not sure if an 'agreement' was 'reached' at the close of the auction, but I'd imagine it wasn't.

 

[NameCharger]

undermining the credibility of their entire auction business,

They lost credibility with me after several attempts at parking a domain with "video" as a keyword.

Every other parking service I use for the keyword "video" can differentiate between adult vs. non-adult ads, especially when the domain is set in a non-adult category.

 

[AdoptableDomains]

I'm not judging, but a technical error can be tough to handle, and two bidders may not even know if a third or 4th bidder was unfairly blocked out due to a technical problem they didn't experience themselves. I don't think it's fair to draw conclusions of impropriety without proof. However, sedo should have to explain why the original outcome was unfair to all the involved parties. Apparently they did admit fault of their system in some way, but should state why the auction was effected and let the transaction stand if the buyer and seller both agree.

If there was an error, they seller could argue that more buyers were not able to bid and they were cheated by not re-auctioning. Another bidder could have been blocked out and said they didn't have a chance to bid. The Winner could win or lose in a rebid. They may get it for more or less than the first time. The seller could win by getting a higher price, or lose by getting a lower price, including sedo with their commission which could go up or down. No matter what happens someone will think they've been cheated. A "do-over" with all previous parties having the same chance is probably their only viable alternative, even though there is no truly fair way to do one.

 

[tricolorro]

Think he means a 4 figure sum ($x000). This seems to have affected several of the greatdomains auctions - I agree, it's pretty unfair to the original winners to have to go through the whole process again.

:hi:

I know it's disappointing to the auction winner but unless there is a pattern of this sort of "technical" problem with Sedo (GreatDomains) auctions you should all be fair and put yourself in the place of the Seller.

Suppose it was YOUR domain being sold and a technical glitch prevented other bids from being placed.

Would you want your domain to be sold off at a price lower than (maybe much lower than) it should have been?

There's two sides to everything.

Patrick