The Official BQB.com Thread

[VURG]

I think I started the first BQB.com auction ever. I'm not sure but it looks like it's up and running.

 

[-REECE-]

Yes, it's impossible to be 100% safe with Paypal:

1 - Someone could have hacked the buyer's account in which case the buyer will get a full refund and you will be out all your money.

2 - For whatever reason an honest buyer could decide to not be so honest anymore -- we saw this a few times in the LLLL.com scam thread. Perhaps they were planning on scamming people from the start and only did a number of transactions honestly to encourage false trust in their credibility.

a) Scammer claims his account was hacked. End result: Same as #1
b) Scammer claims he never received the domain name. End result: Paypal asks you to provide proof of shipping (a tracking number). You'll be unable to do this unless you snail mailed the buyer a contract to sign. If you didn't do that, you'll find your case closed, your money returned to the buyer, and yourself out whatever you rightfully should have received.

It's certainly up for debate whether Moneybookers encourages sellers to be scammers but it really isn't even debatable that accepting Paypal considerably increases your risk of being scammed.

I don't agree with your first comment. I have been scammed by a Trader who had over 150+ Positive feedbacks(no negative feedbacks).

Probably your second comment fits better.

:tu:

Hi Reece, how about that thing regarding contacting bidders prior the auction is over?

Cheers

Hi Lorenzo, I should hopefully have that implemented by the end of July. Emails are sent out at present (was part of the flurry of updates a couple weeks back) when a bidder is outbid.

 

[-REECE-]

Just an update on what's going on at BQB:

The bulk listing software has been fully developed and is now being tested. Should hopefully have it available within a week -- still trying to work out how best to set it up to make sure the feature doesn't get abused (eg. we don't want anyone listing 10,000 domains at $10,000 per because they have a few domains worth that and are too lazy to go through their list and set individual prices).

Have hired a server administrator to optimize BQB and make sure BQB is ready for the considerable load that'll be placed on it once the bulk listing software is uploaded.

Have an Adwords campaign now running for BQB in addition to the advertising on Namepros. New members being referred from Namepros has largely slowed down -- I would imagine most domainers have seen the ad on Namepros enough times to have clicked it by now if they were interested.

Adwords is getting BQB 2-3 new quality members per day. With title and text "Serious Domainers Only" and mentioning that use of BQB is "subject to membership approval" seems to be doing a pretty good job at keeping my costs/clicks down and quality up -- 944000 impressions so far at $0.30 CPM. I can't complain!

 

[AussieDomainer]

Just an update on what's going on at BQB:

The bulk listing software has been fully developed and is now being tested. Should hopefully have it available within a week -- still trying to work out how best to set it up to make sure the feature doesn't get abused (eg. we don't want anyone listing 10,000 domains at $10,000 per because they have a few domains worth that and are too lazy to go through their list and set individual prices).

Have hired a server administrator to optimize BQB and make sure BQB is ready for the considerable load that'll be placed on it once the bulk listing software is uploaded.

Have an Adwords campaign now running for BQB in addition to the advertising on Namepros. New members being referred from Namepros has largely slowed down -- I would imagine most domainers have seen the ad on Namepros enough times to have clicked it by now if they were interested.

Adwords is getting BQB 2-3 new quality members per day. With title and text "Serious Domainers Only" and mentioning that use of BQB is "subject to membership approval" seems to be doing a pretty good job at keeping my costs/clicks down and quality up -- 944000 impressions so far at $0.30 CPM. I can't complain!

Excellent to hear Reece. I think the AdWorlds campaign is a great idea. As long as BQB membership is mainly NamePros only I don't really see it going too far forward. I say this because most people would just list a domain they really want to sell on NP knowing it will probably attract more visitors compared to at BQB where there will only be some NP members view the listing. However if there are quite a few non NP members at BQB I think it could move forwards in leaps & bounds.

 

[-REECE-]

Agree completely David.

Many people have been listing their domains on BQB after they have failed to find buyers on Namepros -- quite predictably, they usually fail to sell on BQB as well because the buyer base on BQB is currently a subset of the Namepros buyer base.

Lots of domainers for one reason or another choose not to participate on domain name forums -- that's one major group I have to look into reaching.


The one thing I want to keep going for BQB is the sense of trust, much like we have at Namepros that we can deal with someone without worrying about getting scammed. After the bulk listing software is uploaded, the first priority will be to implement a "Verified Buyer Only" feature which sellers can choose to implement on their auctions free of charge if they wish to reduce any increase in risk extending to non-Namepros members may bring.

Once the appropriate security measure are in place, I'd like to open BQB to potential endusers and novice domainers who don't currently qualify for BQB membership. So far only 366 out of 449 applications have been approved, so that's a lot of potential members I've missed out on solely to make sure the likelihood of anyone getting scammed is very low. I'm sure 90% of those members I turned down are honest but I just don't have the measures in place to accept the risk that other 10% might bring. So far only 1 scammer has been stupid enough to put the same first + last name in his application that he's used to scam elsewhere -- like I'm not going to google that up before approving people!

Excellent to hear Reece. I think the AdWords campaign is a great idea. As long as BQB membership is mainly NamePros only I don't really see it going too far forward. I say this because most people would just list a domain they really want to sell on NP knowing it will probably attract more visitors compared to at BQB where there will only be some NP members view the listing. However if there are quite a few non NP members at BQB I think it could move forwards in leaps & bounds.

 

[Sufyan]

Hi Reece, how about that thing regarding contacting bidders prior the auction is over?

Cheers

This will greatly help.

The auction for PCLF.COM went without a sale. The max bid I got was $305. And the reserve was only $310. If there were such a feature, I would most probably tell the bidder about it and the domain might have sold out then.

 

[-REECE-]

I'm sorry to hear that Sufyan. Until I get something implemented, the best strategy is to keep reserves underneath round numbers.

eg. Someone will often place a bid of $100, $200, $300, but not $310 or $320. Most bids that have been placed so far fall into either in $X00 or $X50. Keeping your reserve to $X99 or $X49 will likely greatly reduce the odds of missing your reserve should you have a very interested buyer.

 

[-REECE-]

In anticipation of the bulk listing software being deployed, all costs related to starting auctions on particular dates or ending them at particular times have been removed -- so you can start an auction which lasts a year if you want or even setup an auction to start in September if you want. We might have to stagger auction start times (more info on changes related to the bulk listing software follow) moving forward.

The bulk listing software is going to put a lot of extra load on BQB, so we might have to remove 1 and 2 day listings temporarily until we can make sure the system can handle what will likely be the addition of several thousand auctions.

We're going to look into setting it up so that bulk listings are for a minimum of 30 days (you can edit this in your account for each domain individually prior to a bid being placed). Quite predictably listing 1000 domains on BQB will produce far more load than listing 1 domain, so we're testing this carefully to make sure it doesn't cause any server problems and might have to limit bulk entry to a few domainers early on until we have the capabilities and servers in place to handle the load -- feel free to post here or pm me if interested in being among the first to test the bulk listing software (should be ready for testing within a week).

All sales data from June is available here: http://www.bqb.com/custom_page,page,56,topic_id,content_pages . If you'd prefer to not have your domains mentioned in future sales reports, please feel free to pm or email me.

Total sales on BQB for June topped $25000.

 

[planoali]

Total sales on BQB for June topped $25000.

Great job Reece , BQB has come a great way!

 

[Sameh]

Total sales on BQB for June topped $25000.

Great :tu:

Reece, You are an active webmaster/seller/domainer/buyer/flipper and I'm sure that BQB.com will top $xxx,xxx soon.


Congrats!

 

[dmi]

Total sales on BQB for June topped $25000.

Congrats! This is great news!

 

[DNK.it]

Total sales on BQB for June topped $25000.

wow, congratulation Reece :tu:

 

[-REECE-]

Thanks guys!

Small Update: The "Make Offer" feature no longer requires an offer range, so you don't have to put a cap on what someone can potentially offer you.

 

[Sufyan]

I would like to have 'Currently Online Members' count somewhere on the page. What do you guys think of it?

 

[-REECE-]

Maybe if BQB ever gets big like Namepros

Right now I think that would do more harm than good when it says "Currently Online Members: 10".

I would like to have 'Currently Online Members' count somewhere on the page. What do you guys think of it?

 

[sidekick_33]

I was wondering what's currently being done to increase BQB's exposure?

When I look at the past sales that have been completed, I only see $51 worth of sales in the last week. Mind you, there were some large sales in the past month like all of your triples and moky.com.

I'm also a little worried that only 57 LLLL.com's are listed for sale as well. Perhaps the addition of the bulk listing will help to improve this and I look forward to any future upgrades. Hopefully some of the companies out there will realize that BQB is an up-and-comer and will advertise as well! I'm sure that would help you out

 

[VURG]

Reece, Just letting you know that I think that a default auction period of 7 days is more effective than a default auction period of 10 days. It allows the initial bidder more flexibility to plan to be around at the end of the auction.

 

[-REECE-]

Hi Jeremiah,

I'm hoping to have the bulk listing software in place within the next week which I think should help at least increase the number of domains available for sale on BQB 10-fold. It's quite cumbersome to enter a large number of domains at present and I had a few people let me know they would be willing to list their entire short domain collections once there is an easy way to do it.

I released a press release on PR Web advertising BQB and the benefits of investing in short domain names yesterday
(digg link: http://digg.com/tech_news/Short_Domain_Names_Hold_Enormous_Investment_Promise ).

I also run Adwords campaigns every 1-2 days.

I was wondering what's currently being done to increase BQB's exposure?

When I look at the past sales that have been completed, I only see $51 worth of sales in the last week. Mind you, there were some large sales in the past month like all of your triples and moky.com.

I'm also a little worried that only 57 LLLL.com's are listed for sale as well. Perhaps the addition of the bulk listing will help to improve this and I look forward to any future upgrades. Hopefully some of the companies out there will realize that BQB is an up-and-comer and will advertise as well! I'm sure that would help you out

Reece, Just letting you know that I think that a default auction period of 7 days is more effective than a default auction period of 10 days. It allows the initial bidder more flexibility to plan to be around at the end of the auction.

Thanks Phil,

I'll get that changed.

 

[-REECE-]

Just a heads up that there might be some short periods of downtime today.

BQB is getting an upgrade to it's security defences. The server will also be undergoing significant optimization which should speed page load times 200-300% for high speed internet users where BQB is currently the bottleneck in page load times.

This should help better prepare for the increased load which will come about once bulk listing is put into place (still on target for a release early next week).

 

[-REECE-]

The bulk listing software has been tested and appears to be working at 100%

What we need:

1 - The domains you want listed.
2 - The prices you'd like them listed at.
3 - The category you would like them listed in.
4 - The duration of the auctions (minimum 30 days). If you'd like the domains to relist automatically should they not sell, please specify that.

A working example of how we need this arranged can be found here: http://img112.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bqbbulkdemouj9.jpg . We've designed a custom software solution which can turn Microsoft Excel entries into BQB.com auctions. This can also be arranged in OpenOffice Calc, Notepad (1 "Tab" between each column, 1 row per domain), and many other CSV and spreadsheet programs (please feel free to email us to see if it's compatible with your CSV/spreadsheet program).


Once this is completed, please email the file to reece(at)bqb.com . Listing time will be 24-72 hours and we can accomodate bulk domain lists of up to 10,000 domains at one time.

 

[Idees]

The bulk listing sounds easy enough, I might give it a try.