You Have To Honor Your Buys and Sells

The business of buying and selling domain names is really like no other, it sometimes makes a game of three card monty seem legit. So today there is a post on Namepros where someone sold a domain name on Go Daddy, they set up the auction, they sold it. Auction closes at low $xxx. Now the seller has received an offer for $5,000 and wants advice on how they can basically not honor the sale. They did point out that the auction was mistakenly created as no reserve.

So now the majority of members posting have pointed out that they believe the seller needs to honor their agreement. Some also come up with the possibility of a digital version of the old fiddle scam.

Name
The Old Fiddle

Aka
Prize Dog, The Lost Ring

Crew
Two

Victims
Small business owners

The Scam
The first con artist , a poor looking man, goes into a cafe with a violin under his arm. He buys a coffee which he can not afford to pay for. He leaves the violin as security whilst he gets the money. In the mean time, the second con artist, a rich looking collector, enters the same cafe, sees the violin and offers the cafe owner $5000 for it. The cafe owner admits he does not own and so the rich looking collector leaves his business card.

When the first con artist returns to pay for his coffee, the cafe owner buys the violin from him. The con artist will haggle and the price goes up to $1000. Of course, the violin is worthless and neither con artist is seen again.

Perhaps the buyer sent the email, in the hopes of playing off the greed of the seller and offered $5,000, assuming that the seller will come back to him under his other alias, and try to buy back the name for say $500 to $1,000 because there is $5,000 waiting.

The seller has put that notion to rest as he did not want to tell people originally that the offer came from someone he contacted before starting the auction. He seems flabbergasted that people are focusing on morality and the right thing, when all he wanted was advice on how to get out of completing this auction.

Here was the initial post:

I just recently sold a domain at GoDaddy auctions for low $xxx. It was accidentally listed with no reserve.

Then today I just received an offer from someone for $5,000. I did a reverse whois on the email and their portfolio is worth well over $200k. Many NNN.com’s and NNNN.com’s.

So of course I’m going to try to cancel this transaction at all cost, but how do I do this? GoDaddy is not just going to let me do it.

The transaction is not entirely completed yet, the domain has been removed from my account, but I have not received the funds yet.

Please give me your thoughts on how I should handle this situation…

Look at the end of the day if you sell enough domain names you are going to sell one that gets a better offer after the fact. If one is going to do outbound marketing it makes sense to wait a period of time longer than a month before auctioning that name. A prospect may have been traveling or busy. You need to make up your mind how you are going to market and sell and give yourself time.

I one time sold a name for $75 on a forum, I had not pushed it yet but the buyer said sold, I got an email that night from someone offering $500, and asking what my best price was ? I pushed the domain and let the buyer know of a prospective buyer. They were very appreciative of the fact I did not make some excuse and take the $500 or negotiate higher, they wanted the name for a project and did not want to sell the domain.

At the end of the day if you plan on being in this business you have to honor your buys and sells. If you are not going to do that, at the very least don’t come onto a forum and ask how you can back out of a deal. The domain may very well have been purchased by a member on the forum.