[/COLOR]Edit : It looks like you are trying to increase the quality (with today's aged domain offerings). I think the reserves may be a little high with regard to drawing many buyers to the table, but let's see what happens...
At this point, the only thing we can do is
experiment. You've mentioned that we even had $1 sales, that's true and it's just as true that we had a $1,500 sale last week (VOPU.com), for example.
Auctionpus.com is less than a month old and at this point, experimenting and gathering data is the name of the game. Even after we have our first year under our belt, predicting how the market will react to one domain or another will still be impossible and that's the great thing about domaining IMO.
We've had affordable domains on the one hand and we've had top dollar domains on the other. For example, we've had 3 CVCV dot com sales so far: PAXE.com, CUXA.com and VOPU.com. The same way, we had/have our share of top dollar listings: Gum.net, Punches.com, Y.pe, Q.pe, CUGI.com, Phobias.net, Casserole.net, Drapes.net, Links.biz and so on.
This is a marathon, not a race. We need to find the right balance between top dollar domains and affordable domains. On the one hand, some people are focusing on 4-5 figure domains atm and that's great but on the other hand, lots of folks can only afford 2-3 figure domains and we need to keep as many people as possible happy.
How do things stand with the top dollar domain reseller market atm?
How do things stand with affordable domains?
Which types of domains do people respond better to?
Which TLDs do people respond better to?
Do our users prefer themed auctions?
Do they prefer product name domains?
Do they prefer brandables?
These are just some of the questions which we need to find answers for right now and we can only do that by experimenting. You might see 8 4-figure domains listed today and then 8 two-figure domains tomorrow. You might see 8 brandables the next day and 8 exact match product name domains the day after that.
For example, our main experiment for today is casserole.net. A domain which has everything it needs: regged back in 1999, over 90,000 EXACT match monthly searches and over 4,000,000 broad monthly searches. We listed it with a starting bid of $1 (yes, a buck) and NO RESERVE. We want to see how the market reacts and have decided to let it decide how much the domain is worth.
There isn't enough data to paint a clear picture yet (again, Auctionpus.com is less than a month old), it's all a matter of experimenting and putting the pieces together.
