hostingsearch said:
I've already waited for five months...
The buyer seems have paid sedo the money, but he doesn't initiate a request to transfer the domain to his own registrant account. (instead he tried to take away MY registrant account and all my domains in that account)
I've emailed sedo and PMed Keith here, but nobody respond.
10/10/07 Agreement reached
10/10/07 We have invoiced the buyer for the sale of your domain. As soon as the payment reaches our escrow account we will inform you and begin the technical transfer.
10/31/07 We have received full payment for this domain. Please await further instructions from your transfer agent. It is often the case that we have to wait for certain details from the buyer so please be patient during this period.
I think the process needs to be fixed for situations where the buyer pays and doesn't initiate the transfer. The problem with the current process is that the seller does not have the buyer information, yet the sale is essentially complete, or at least has the potential to be complete since the transaction is already funded. I figure that the following reasons are to blame for situations where the buyer has paid but not initiated the transfer:
- Buyer has no experience with the Internet and has a hard time doing anything that is not sent to him with specific and easy instructions.
- Buyer thinks the sale is compete and has no immediate use for the site so doesn't realize that there is anything left to do. Sedo's emails could be going to his spam mailbox or maybe the buyer has since changed their email address like many people do when changing their Internet service.
- Buyer didn't want the domain and has put in a chargeback with their credit card company, but Sedo hasn't updated the transaction details.
- Fraudulent payment was used in the transaction, but the transaction was not updated (less likely).
- The buyer procrastinates everything. These are the people that don't send in the $100 mail in rebates until it is a week past the expired date.
- The buyer has gotten sick, died, or had some other tragedy in their life that has made them not care about the transaction.
I didn't think number 1 was possible until a few weeks ago when a friend and I purchased a domain from a guy who bought it years ago for his business but no longer needed it. We offered him a fair four figure price for the name and he gladly accepted, but when it came to the transfer it was a nightmare. My friend and I thought that he was trying to sell it to another buyer because of how slow things were going. I sent him detailed instructions on how to change accounts and even links to GoDaddy instructions, but then he wrote me back an email saying that he was waiting for an email from GoDaddy to initiate the transfer. So I figured out that he was never going to initiate an account change because he didn't understand the processes available. So my friend ended up starting a transfer from GoDaddy to Godaddy and that did the trick. As soon as the seller received an email from godaddy that had a link he could click on the transaction was completed that day. I think the seller would have waited weeks before initiating something himself.
The problem with the Sedo process is that you have no way to contact the buyer, so you rely on a Sedo agent, but if Sedo is only making 10% on a $300 transaction, how much time can they really spend on the transaction before it is losing them money. If there are issues with the transaction, I think the contact information should be released once the payment is made. Whether the payment was made by credit card or wire transfer, after 90 days there is no way for the buyer to recover the funds anyway, so Sedo should put the domain in a temporary escrow account where it can sit until the buyer comes around or until the domain expires, and transfer the funds to the seller. Waiting for more than 90 days after payment is made makes no sense to me, since Sedo is obviously in control of the funds.
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Updated:
After thinking about this situation a little more, I would like to know the outcome from situations where the buyer paid and the domain was never transferred. Do the funds for these "abandoned" transactions just go to Sedo? Because the reality of it is if they know the transaction is abandoned, why would they give you 90% of the funds if they can keep all of the funds since the transaction was never really "completed"? The larger picture might be that 1% of all transactions are abandoned after payment and it equates to $xxx,xxx per year, so why take $xx,xxx per year when you can take the larger amount with no negative effects (seller still has the domain, buyer is not complaining, and the escrow company has another $x,xxx from an incomplete transaction in their account, etc).
