Sedo fees are:
10% for fixed price + parked
15% for non fixed price + parked
20% for all others
.PRO is now part of the Category 1 domains and only has a $50 min. fee.
While I can understand your frustration with non-paying bidders, I've had my share in the past, you can't really ignore sedo as a sales channel.
And with the total number of .pro registered being less than 100k, don't think Sedo would be too perturbed by any 'action' .pro investors take.
All these new fees have done is to make me increase the asking price at sedo by 10%.
If you increase your prices by 10%, it reduces the likelihood of you selling a domain. In my experience, buyers on Sedo don't have as much money as direct WHOIS enquiries and are more likely to be individuals than businesses. Their demand for domains is more price elastic than direct WHOIS contacts, i.e. small increases in your price will result in disproportionally fewer sales.
If you had a $1m generic .com with thousands of type ins, would you be willing to set a fixed price and park it at Sedo or hand over $200,000 from the sales proceeds? Firstly, you wouldn't be maximising PPC income and $200,000 is a alot amount of money to hand over when anybody willing to pay $1m for a domain probably knows what they want and will contact you through the WHOIS. Charging 20% commission or forcing people to park will lead to the quality of domains at Sedo, already low in my view, falling even further. That means fewer big spenders watching auctions and surfing and lower prices for sellers.
If you have a brandable .com worth $1,000 to $100,000 depending on the buyer, wouldn't you as a seller like the opportunity to put your key phrase into Google and check to see if an enquiry is likely to be from somebody who has just set up a company with that name or maybe applied for a trademark. Fixed prices hamper your ability to sell a $1,000 domain for $100,000. There are also some domain buyers who are psychologically incapable of paying a fixed price, the only way to make a sale to them is to double the asking price and knock 50% off. Why should Sedo dictate or influence your pricing or selling strategy?
Domainers who have most to gain from Sedo are those with commodity LLL.coms with poor to average letter combinations, they need a Sedo auction with 50-100 bidders to extract maximum value for their domains, in which case 15% or even 20% fees might be money well spent. .pro domainers don't really need Sedo because a minded buyer will probably offer more than a domainer at auction anyway and you could get that offer privately through the WHOIS.
One of most annoying things Sedo did was to stop listing .pros in search results, this has reduced the quantity, if not the quality, of offers I get on my .pros which made Sedo a less valuable sales channel to me even before the doubling of fees. I promote their website by linking my .pros in the Total.pro Pro Shop to the Sedo landing page, thereby costing myself direct sales, and they in turn do their best not to promote my .pros.
Another thing Sedo should consider is alot of domain sellers are also buyers on Sedo. If I pull my domains for sale on Sedo, I won't be on the website watching auctions, plus if I think buyers are going to hike their price by 20% over what they would sell privately for, I will always contact them by email, thereby cutting Sedo out of the loop. The only thing that gets me to bid or buy on Sedo is the 10% fee less the Escrow.com equivalent fee is sometimes worth paying for anonymity and less hassle. At 20% that calculation I do in mind before bidding for a domain on Sedo will fall heavily down on the other side.
Finally, this 20% fee will encourage more websites to copy what Sedo do at 10% and that will be no bad thing for domain buyers and sellers because Sedo aren't that great at what they do. If they took a 10% shadow credit card charge on bids or took at least some non-paying bidders to court, they would stamp out non-paying bidders for starters. For a German company, they are extremely inefficient in my opinion and certainly don't warrant doubling their current 10% fee whether they are the biggest player in the market or not.
