I received a few emails from the seller of WAN.com and like many people thought, the high bidder for the auction was nowhere to be found. The auction closed at over $670,000 and would have been Godaddy’s highest priced auction in history. Unfortunately for David it was too good to be true.
He seems to be a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing as you can imagine. Having the chance of getting $600,000 come and go would be an emotional roller coaster. It’s a life changing amount of money and being new to auctions in general, he had no idea what to think. He did let me know that Godaddy handled everything very well and was professional and timely with the whole procedure despite not being able to deliver the buyer.
Rather that pursue legal or take it any further, David is going to step back a while, take some time off from the domain and figure out the future of WAN.com. It’s most certainly still for sale but its going to be a few more weeks until he decides what kind of price he’s seeking and whether he’ll auction or broker the name.
I hoped it would be a successful sale because we all wish something like that would happen to us. To get a life changing amount for a domain. It didn’t happen this time but I’m sure WAN.com will still do well for him some time in the future.
The auction sites need to require money in an account for any bids going over a certain amount. It should be no different than the securities industry. No cash/margin in account. No trade.
John,
Great point, article coming 🙂
Yes John, I agree with you.
Agreed John, big black eye for the GoDaddy aftermarket. I understand things like this are prone to happen anywhere, but to have no bidder verification or qualification process in place leaves the door wide open for situations like this to happen.
For all we know, a 13 year old with a $5 visa gift card (enough for the GD auction membership) could be sitting there running up the price on a half a million dollar domain name.
Sad indeed. Hope some good comes out of this sorry situation…
Do you think any hobo can wander into Sotheby’s, grab a paddle and start pledging millions to buy the a painting?
It’s always been completely ridiculous to have unsecured bidding past a certain level but U2U marketplaces have always tried to keep the hands-off approach as long as they could. Ebay used to be this way as far as indemnifying the sales, until the total loss of credibility in their marketplace caused them lose a ton of customers.
It’s still a great name. He should try contacting 4.cn and ask if they would sell it.
The best he can get is 15-20k for this name.
Or even end user may not pay more than 25-30k
I hope he was not bidding on his domain himself….seems like he was to get press n try to inclease value of name.
Emotional rollercoaster……..lmao….john you do get funny sometimes haha
I guess one of name ….someone wanted to pay 6you gigures…..opps the biyer never showed up…….n am emotionally stressed lmao haha
GD auctions really needs to get their shit together. Like really. This should never happen
He probably thought he was bidding in Yuan.