Buying Short Domains on eBay
I mentioned yesterday that I’ve started a little experiment to get a better idea of how the eBay LLLL.com market differs from the rest of the LLLL.com market. With domains ending at completely random times, it’s not surprising we sometimes see low sales and with the millions of people on eBay, it’s unsurprising that we sometimes see sales well above what a short domain name investor would likely pay. Below you’ll see my experience using eBay over the past few days. It’s quite obvious I’ve been losing far more auctions than I’ve won — I place my bids based on both what I think I could get in the current market for the domain and how much work would be involved in selling it. Granted I am looking to resell these domains at a profit in the near future, I probably shouldn’t be winning many auctions (and indeed I’m not), as if I were winning most of them, that would probably mean I’m paying near or possibly even above fair market value. About half of my bids are quite close to the ending price, the other half are for the most part well below it. I have edited the pages a bit to make them fit below, however all numbers are the exact sale prices and bids I placed on those domains. There are 4 images below (hover over starting from the top down and observe the 4 different URLs) which you can click on to enlarge so the details will be a bit easier to read. The final image (the one which has green prices) are the domains I managed to win. Is it worth all that effort to get a few good deals on eBay? I guess that’s something you’ll need to decide, but it sure makes for something fun to do when you have a bit of downtime. Looking at the sales numbers, you’ll notice that I tend to be closer to the actual sales price on the bulk lots than on individual lots — as the number of LLLL.coms in a lot become larger and larger, the closer we’ll get to the expected outcomes we know based on past sales history. With a single sale, it’s hard to account for factors such as a particular domain being “perfect” for a development project someone has in mind or an acronym they like.
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May 10th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
“About half of my bids are quite close to the ending price”
Reece,
This would only have relevance if there were more than 2 bidders (bidders, not bids).
Did all the auctions have more than 2 bidders?
May 10th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
That’s a good question Patrick — I’m going to log into my account and see as I’m curious myself.
edit: I went through 20 of them Patrick and all but one had at least 3 bids. Most had between 3 and 5 bids.
May 10th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
“…and all but one had at least 3 bids.”
Hi Reece,
Reese, the # of bids isn’t relevant.
The # of Bidders is.
Example:
If you and I bid (2 Bidders) and I drop out at $5.00, you’d only bid $5.01
or up to the next allowed increment.
Bid total could be just 2 but could be more but # of Bidders is just 2.
If together we made 21 bids and I drop out at $50, you’d only bid $50.01
or up to the next allowed increment.
The # of bids could be very many but still only 2 Bidders.
Hence my bid in either case would naturally be very close to the final price.
You need 3 or more Bidders in the auction in order to say with relevance
“About half of my bids are quite close to the ending price”.
It’s not a big deal and was just an observation as I was reading your post.
May 10th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Sorry. I spelled Reece incorrectly second line.
May 10th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Hi Patrick,
Sorry that was a typo on my part — I meant to say bidders — 3+ bidders on all but one, sorry about that.