.mobi Sedo Screw Up

[mo_dork]

what a mess.
today, i was the highest bidder on my mobi of choice. received confirmation from sedo that i had won the auction, received several emails about where to send payment etc. then later auction restarted.

meanwhile i went to lunch and then a meeting after the end of the auction, and was unaware. came back to my computer and saw it was all screwed up and apparently i had been out bid.

so i ended up with nothing. meanwhile i would have bid 50% more than the winning bid.
i imagine i am not the only person that this happened to.

sedo should have honored the winning bid OR they should have given plenty of warning that the auction would be restarted. instead only a smaller subset of bidders were aware that the auction would restart.

there must be many annoyed people out there, not to mention that dotMobi didnt get the best price for there goods.

ridiculous.
any other horror stories?

m_d

 

[connections]

Well I won my two auctions which i had my eyes on, had the confirmation PDF's was ready to send money ect ect.

The funny thing is I never had any down time on my SEDO account, I don't know why but nothing played up on my account??

I saw a lot of people complaining, then SEDO decided to re start the two actions which I had won even after I had the confirmation PDF and emails for a further 2 hours and 30 minutes.

I then found that one of the domains I had won, had a few new bidders on it, who then increase the price a great deal.

Overall I still won the original two domains which I won in the first place but I was out of pocket mid-high $xxx.

If I had lost the domains I would be considering litigation under "breach of contract" because it is SEDO's fault, if they cant afford a good server to auction off millions of dollars worth of items, if they cant use common sense and stagger auctions who is left to blame, yet they would probly get away with it due to their TOS I guess.

But overall their is not point complaining now as I have all ready paid for my domains.

Sure I am out of pocket a decent sum of money, but I have to cut my losses and look towards the future, I have only just turned 20 and am a full time student so loosing a few hundred is decent to me I am not a high roller domain buyer like some people here claim to be.

Another annoying thing is that I am from a different time zone, I live in Australia and I was up all night bidding from 3am to 7am.

These things happen but in SEDO's TOS they possibly have some section about this been 100% ok, but as a buyer and seller I will possibly be not looking to use their services any more.

I also think they should have waved the 3% paypal fee they also hit me with to help clear some of the pain =)

Sedo needs to wake up before another site pop's up and chews up their market share.

I can see it happening very soon.

 

[allnicksgone]

Yes, they certainly did screw up.

After the heavy traffic crashed their servers, there was no perfect way to correct the problem.

The notifications you received were automatically generated once the auction ended. Because the crash happened only minutes before the scheduled auction end, it may not have been enough time to stop those winners' e-mails from being sent.

A bad situation indeed. But, besides preventing the server crash in the first place, I think Sedo did the best possible under the circumstances at the time.

Staggering the auctions so they don't all end at the same time may have been a good idea.

 

[JamesDavid]

A buddy of mine and myself decided to bid on one of the mobi domains for a development project. Anyways he won the domain. He had to bid on it because I was at work. He called me and said he won the auction paid the money and we were set to go. We then met for lunch to celebrate and sorta kick off the new venture which we both knew would be a great idea and fill a void in the internet as far as mobis go. Long story short, he got home from lunch and pretty much called me trembling......... the auction restarted and then ended again with us not being the highest bidder. Quite frankly we are both upset and this is honestly an outrage. I think Sedo should honor their auctions. As I heard someone else stating, if you wanna be a big time website then get a big time staff and big time servers and don't let this kind of stuff happen......

 

[Alan Glennon]

Staggering the auctions so they don't all end at the same time may have been a good idea.

For sure. I think they do them all at the same time out of sheer laziness.

 

[accent]

Yeah, it really all comes back to SEDO.

This was the third auction. Better names mean more traffic, but it is not likely that it was that much more. They really blew it - does not even seem to be a tech issue, just not enough capacity.

Renting back-up server time for a few hours would have prevented this mess for a few dollars. Unbelievable.

 

[newdomainer.mobi]

I take it the situation helped you rather than hindered?

Yes, they certainly did screw up.

After the heavy traffic crashed their servers, there was no perfect way to correct the problem.

The notifications you received were automatically generated once the auction ended. Because the crash happened only minutes before the scheduled auction end, it may not have been enough time to stop those winners' e-mails from being sent.

A bad situation indeed. But, besides preventing the server crash in the first place, I think Sedo did the best possible under the circumstances at the time.

Staggering the auctions so they don't all end at the same time may have been a good idea.

It's easy to say this if you haven't lost a name that you had a 6 figure end game for!!