On Thursday, Flippa announced an update to their bidding certification requirements, with premium certification now required for bids over $5,000.
Flippa has had its share of completed auctions which ultimately didn’t close due to non-paying bidders, but they continue to make strides to ensure the security and integrity of its marketplace
The full announcement is below.
“Today we released an important update to bidding and making offers on Flippa.com. All new bids and offers over $5,000 will require buyers to complete an additional premium certification requirement, to help ensure auctions run smoothly.
What does this mean?
- Before placing a bid, offer or buy-now request over $5,000 you must complete a premium certification.
- Premium certification requires a $500 preauthorization to be held on your credit card – this is held for seven days.
- At this point in time it is a once-only requirement meaning future bids over $5,000 won’t require re-certification.
We’re making these changes to ensure Flippa continues to be the safest and most trusted marketplace for entrepreneurs.
Thanks,
Flippa Team”
Sounds pretty close to what i had been preaching about for a few years now in all the blogs.
Hope others will follow.
Forgot to say , i like Shane on the Sherpa show, he’s a great addition.
C’mon Shane, are you posing as “brand”? 🙂
Now all they need, is to do something about sellers who refuse to transfer domains that have been won.
Nick, if it’s a problem, I’m sure they’re working on a solution to fix it. They have been pretty responsive to people’s concerns in the past.
Personally, I’ve bought and sold over 100 domains in 10+ transactions at Flippa and they’ve all thankfully been smooth.
Good for Flippa and those of us who are tired of bidding against ghost. IMO… they need to fix the clock reset at the end of auctions as well. Resetting the clock to an hour is way to much time.
I’ve heard the clock reset before, but I don’t know if anything is in the works:
http://domainshane.com/dear-owners-flippa-great-job-now-fix-problems/
Flippa is not following their own policies: http://flippa.com/blog/flippa-101-bidding-and-negotiation/
It clearly states that no auction will be extended if your are winning the auction and you have a proxy bid which is higher than any other bids in the last hour. Their words “Automatic Bidding system” means proxy bids.
This is a direct quote from that page:
“Auctions are not extended if the bidding is a result of the Automatic Bidding system incremental bids as in the following example:
Bidder 1 has a high bid of $1,000 and a maximum bid of $1,500 with 30 minutes to go in the auction. Bidder 2 places a bid of $1,100. The Automatic Bidding system bids $1,150 on behalf of Bidder 1. The auction IS NOT extended because Bidder 1 is not a new high bidder.”
The only beneficiaries are Flippa and sellers. The buyers are the ones who end up paying much more.
As far as regular auctions being extended 1 hour repeatedly, that’s just a horrible setup. I think the king of auctions Ebay knows how to run an auction and they don’t extend any auctions.
RayJ,
Old mews, old problem. http://domainshane.com/dear-owners-flippa-great-job-now-fix-problems/
Shane,
What I posted is different than that what was posted on the previous thread.. I’ve not had proxy bids raised to the max. It’s that the auctions are repeatedly extending, even though I have a higher proxy bid. I’ve never had my highest proxy bid placed automatically. It only does that for reserve auctions and it will place your bid as high as you have until it hits the reserve. I don’t like that either, but we are talking about different issues. My problem is their own URL states to the contrary and the information is burried and hard to find.