PushToAuction.com Helps Get Domains on Sedo™ Auction

[Michael]

I just wanted to let everyone know who hasn't already heard of the site that PushToAuction.com is a place to market domains that you would like to push to auction at Sedo™.

But what does Sedo™ think about all this?
I spoke with Mark Klein, Sedo's director of business development, about the concept, intent, and implementation of the site. He is well aware of the site's existence, and hasn't expressed any desire for us to stop providing this service to industry professionals.

But won't this lead to a lot of canceled auctions?
The answer is no. I worked closely with Tom Fell, Sedo's North American risk management coordinator, to monitor several hundred auctions started through the site. He was unable to find any correlation between an auction having been started from our site and an increase in canceled auctions. Essentially, the ratio of completed auctions to canceled auctions on Sedo as a whole was not markedly different then the ratio for ones started from PushToAuction.

But won't this encourage favors?
We have made the site as anonymous as possible by not having user names and requiring logins. If you don't know who made the offer, you won't be inclined to reciprocate.

So, how does it work?
You list your domain for free on PushToAuction.com. If someone browsing the site would be happy purchasing your domain for at least $60, they will proceed to make the offer through Sedo™. Once the offer is received, the seller is obligated to push to domain to auction. We also have a featured listing option available for $5 that places the listing on the home page and the top of its category.

Are people having success using the site?
Absolutely! At the time of this post, PushToAuction.com has started 271 auctions. Of those, 255 have already ended with sales totaling $79,117, an average of $310 per domain. The highest sale so far was 6JJ.com which closed at $1,068. These stats are updated live on the right side-bar. Not bad for having only been live four months :tu:

So what's in it for buyers?
Two things. The most important benefit from the site is saving time. Let's say you want to buy a CCC.com at fair market value. You go through Sedo making a few dozen offers, but every single one of those gets countered with $30k+ (as usually happens on Sedo). You just wasted hours of your time searching, and you don't have your domain. Instead, just pop on PushToAuction.com, go to the Acronyms category, make a single $60 offer, and seven days later you have your domain at a fair price.

The second reason buyers use the site is they are hoping to get the domain cheap. Imagine if you made a $60 offer on a domain that is $300 min wholesale and nobody noticed the auction. You just got a bargain! The truth is that rarely happens, but there's no harm in trying, you never know when you'll get lucky

Am I going to waste time clicking a lot of dead links?
We wouldn't do that to you. There are sophisticated programs running in the background that maintain the site. If a listing gets deleted from Sedo, the listing automatically gets removed from the site. If a listing gets pushed to auction, it automatically gets moved to Current Auctions. When an auction closes, it automatically gets moved to Past Auctions, the price gets recorded, and the home page stats get updated. This update happens once a day at 5am EST (GMT -5).

We've spent a lot of time creating the site, promoting it, and making sure Sedo is comfortable with it. We hope it provides a valuable service to the community and makes the process of buying or selling a domain more efficient.

Domain Name Wire even did a feature on the site, click here to read it.

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Easydoms]

Good luck with you conitued sucess, may be sending some your way very soon

 

[mis_chiff]

You can submit anything that you can sell on Sedo. For some ccTLDs Sedo requires a higher minimum bid than $60, so if that is true for .ca it would help site visitors if you mention that in your description.

We've now broken $100,000 in aucitons started through the site! Congrats to everyone who has participated :tu:

Congrats on that milestone Michael :tu:

I have sent a PM regarding the .ca stuff, I have no idea
what the minimum starting bid for .ca is :red:

 

[Michael]

PM replied to. For anyone else wondering, I checked with Sedo and the min bid for .ca is $110.

 

[mis_chiff]

PM replied to. For anyone else wondering, I checked with Sedo and the min bid for .ca is $110.

Thanks Mike, I have adjusted my listings, and will re-submit

 

[Michael]

We updated the software to approve listings every 30 minutes. As long as your domains are listed for sale on Sedo they'll get approved very quickly now.

The site has now started 351 auctions. 345 have closed at the time of this post for a total of $108,708.

 

[Archangel]

Another thought: Personally, I would charge $0.25 per name for regular listing. paid via np or paypal.
You are providing a service, and if someone thinks their name is worth $60, then $.25 should be the entry fee.

Doesn't PtA make a percentage from every sale generated through their site? If not, why is it up, anyway? I mean, what would the creator(s) of the site be getting from all the work involved? What's the compensation of owning/operating the site?

 

[Michael]

I'm doing it because it is something the community needs. I don't make a commission on auction sales, Sedo only pays out if someone goes on to buy something in Sedo's affiliate program like a showcase listing or an escrow order. I make a little from selling featured listings on PushToAuction.com at $5 and selling advertising, but it isn't about the money.

 

[-REECE-]

Great to hear, Congrats Mike!

It really is something the community needed and I'm glad to hear it's coming along so well.

We updated the software to approve listings every 30 minutes. As long as your domains are listed for sale on Sedo they'll get approved very quickly now.

The site has now started 351 auctions. 345 have closed at the time of this post for a total of $108,708.

 

[Archangel]

I'm doing it because it is something the community needs. I don't make a commission on auction sales, Sedo only pays out if someone goes on to buy something in Sedo's affiliate program like a showcase listing or an escrow order. I make a little from selling featured listings on PushToAuction.com at $5 and selling advertising, but it isn't about the money.

This is nice to know It's a concept I've been hoping would come about eventually

 

[pcp]

Looks good, Mike.
I have a couple of questions:
If a featured listing is placed, does it automatically become a free listing after 1 month (if unsold of course)?
Is it possible to remove a listing - if I decided to develop a domain instead of selling for example?
Sorry if this has already been answered. Maybe you could add a FAQ page?
In any case, it seems like a great service - good luck.

 

[Michael]

Yes, after one month a featured listing gets switched to a free listing if it hasn't been sold. Because I don't require any logins, there isn't a quick way to remove a listing. You can shoot me a PM or send me an email through the contact form on the site and I can delete it. That's next on my list of improvements though.

 

[pcp]

Cool. Thanks for the fast reply.
I will take a look through my domains later and give it a try.

 

[Archangel]

Cool. Thanks for the fast reply.
I will take a look through my domains later and give it a try.

It's worth a hot. I just submitted about 20 domains Got a few more to list once SEDO adds them to my account.

I think there should be a feature where a person get an automated email if their domain is accepted... or was that already implemented? It'd save us all a load of time.

 

[Michael]

Everything gets approved within 30 minutes now as long as it is listed for sale on Sedo, so no need for a confirmation email. If it isn't on Sedo when you submit it, the listing gets deleted from the database. The only ones that don't get automatically approved are featured listings because I need to verify payment first.

I'm working on adding the ability to sort by date right now as a way to let poor-quality submissions fall to the bottom. If a domain is on the site for a while and didn't get a bid it'll keep dropping farther down the list. Adding voting is lower on my to-do list, but something I would like to implement to measure quality and help the cream rise to the top.

When the site is more well-known I'll also change the "Hits" sorting method to be hits/week, because right now domains that have been on the site longer have an advantage at getting more hits, and thus isn't the best indicator of quality.

So far the site has sent more than 52,000 hits to Sedo listings.

Edit: Sorting by date has been added and is the default method.

 

[dotnom]

Michael i noticed your site before some time and the whole idea looks very promising
I have 87 spare names i could list to your site
They're all at the same category

Do you want me to PM them to you because i didn't followup to see what happened to the bulk option you planned to implement

 

[Michael]

I decided against bulk submissions, at least for the time being.

 

[Archangel]

I decided against bulk submissions, at least for the time being.

This is the best you can do. I mean, if you allowed bulk, then there would be too many worthless domains cluttering up the site.

 

[dotnom]

Well i'm not sure i agree with the bulk submission decision (of course this is just my opinion)

If the user wants to submit more than one then the difficulty is up to the domainer and not anyone else
Submit one domain, back from the browser paste the other one, or even automate the process with macro programs

As for the quality of the name the domainer will submit, i don't think that someone will think that the $60 bound opening limit will be beneficial for his premium/good or normal domain

My point is that there should be no hassle to the domain submission but rather to domain filtering

 

[Michael]

How would you suggest filtering?

 

[Archangel]

As for the quality of the name the domainer will submit, i don't think that someone will think that the $60 bound opening limit will be beneficial for his premium/good or normal domain

But what if a person has a load of trashy domains that have no real value? If they believed in their domains, then they would go through the hassle of listing them one by one. If they don't have faith in their bulk of domains, they won't take the time.

And with sh*tty domains selling for unrealistically high prices, who's to say that the owner of ReallyStupidDomainThatllMakeMeRich.ws wouldn't post this (or worse) domain in hope that some retarded individual would pay $60 for it? Bulk submissions would be far easier but I think it's for the best to only list once at a time.

 

[dotnom]

How would you suggest filtering?

Other than manually review them, maybe a quick estibot appraisal will sort the real trash from the rest (i'm not implying that estibot must be taken as a serious appraisal tool, but only as indication/trend of the value). When you put obstacles to the participation you don't necessary provide better quality.

But what if a person has a load of trashy domains that have no real value? If they believed in their domains, then they would go through the hassle of listing them one by one. If they don't have faith in their bulk of domains, they won't take the time

...and what if they do believe in their trashy domains and list them one by one ?
We both see people buy domains like ReallyStupidDomainThatllMakeMeRich.ws as you said and think they took the next business.com sale
- How the pushtoaction service will take benefit from this action ?
- There are 100s macro automation tools and i don't want to mention the antiCaptcha scripts (currently known for file download services)

And with sh*tty domains selling for unrealistically high prices, who's to say that the owner of ReallyStupidDomainThatllMakeMeRich.ws wouldn't post this (or worse) domain in hope that some retarded individual would pay $60 for it?

Nobody can prevent that and actually there're 1000s domains here, there, everywhere with the exact idea as you described it above and this gives one more reason for namepros.com and other related sites to exist, especially for the "retarded individual" that will take the time to search and ask before he buys

 

[Archangel]

I see more ppl buying w/o research than the other way around.

But perhaps you're onto something: Maybe domains could be screened via estibot or similar and if their domain isn't accepted, a person could use a feedback submission button to ask the site owner to manually scan the list submitted. That wouldn't be a bad idea. (Afternic's Bazaar is similar: If they detect an adult domain being submitted for auction, they'll refuse to list it but would give the user the option to have a staff member manually approve of a domain)

 

[Michael]

I want to avoid manually approving/rejecting submissions because then I'll start getting a flood of emails from people asking why theirs wasn't accepted. Also, there have been dozens of domains that got pushed to auction that I didn't think would, and I don't want to prevent any sales from happening. The easiest thing would be for sellers to show restraint and only submit domains that are liquid at $60+ in the reseller market, but that isn't going to happen.

The only way to make people think twice is either to make it take up more of their time, or to charge them a fee for using the service. I'd rather do the former, because the latter could prevent good domains from being submitted because the seller can't or doesn't want to pay.

I think the way it is now works well. Someone asked me a few months ago to implement bulk submissions because he had over 1,000 domains he wanted to list. He said it would take 3-4 hours to submit them all, and that he didn't have that much time to spare.

My reply was that if he didn't think they would all get pushed to auction, then not having bulk submissions just served its purpose. If he did think they would all get pushed to auction, 3-4 hours was a small price to pay for $60,000+ in sales.

PushToAuction.com isn't about casting a wide net by listing your entire portfolio and hoping to get a bite. It is about liquidating targeted domains that are worth more than $60 by getting them on Sedo auction.

 

[pcp]

I noticed in the CVCV section, half aren't actually CVCV and some aren't even LLLL.
I don't like to be a "telltale" but on the other hand I don't think buyers looking for a specific category want to wade through pages of irrelevant names.
Maybe at some point it would be possible to have "wrong category" tab to report listings. Particularly if someone puts an adult name somewhere inappropriate.
Just a thought...

 

[Michael]

Thanks Philip. Most of those were submitted today and I've been out of town and couldn't get to it. I removed all the ones that aren't CVCV.

I'll add a feature to report a listing fairly high up on the to-do list.