Domain Auctions

One of the things I like about DropCatch.com auctions is that I get control of the domain names almost immediately after I pay for them. I’ll win an auction or receive the backorder success emails, visit the account to pay, and the names appear instantly in my associated NameBright account.

That’s what typically happens. Yesterday, I bought 3 domain names via auction and paid for them immediately. The domain names did not appear in my account. I submitted a support ticket but didn’t hear back. I followed up this morning when I still hadn’t heard anything, but that went unanswered. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been any communication about an issue from anyone at the company so I did not know if this was an isolated issue or something more widespread.

When I was following the end of the DropCatch auction of Spend.com, I was unable to visit the landing page due to a website error. Observing the auction from the homepage, bidding had surpassed $700,000, and it appeared to be closing at $702,500 with more than 300 bids placed.

Due to the technical errors that were plaguing the platform, the auction was extended by 24 hours. In fact, there’s a message on top of the website stating “We are currently addressing issues with auctions ending today and will be extending those auctions.”

If you’re trying to place your pending delete backorders at DropCatch.com right now, you’re probably not able to do so due to an “Unknown Error.” The “Unknown Error – Http failure response for https://client.dropcatch.com/Search: 0 Unknown Error” message is shown at the bottom of the homepage, and the website does not otherwise load.

I posted about this on X this morning, and others are facing the same issue, so it appears to be a global error impacting many – if not all – users:

DropCatch.com has won the sweepstakes to catch Spend.com, a domain name that was fully deleted by its former registrar, Amazon. The domain name will now be sold to the highest bidder when the auction concludes in a little less than 3 days.

Spend.com was previously acquired for $275,000 in 2017 via Sedo. Prior to that, it was acquired for $77,000 in 2007.

With the high bid approaching $60,000, Spend.com could become one of the largest expiry domain name sales recorded at DropCatch.com. According to NameBio, the largest sale was Lian.com, which sold for $220,950 in 2016. Medal.com sold for $185,728 in 2022.

Any guesses about where this auction will end?

Update: Spend.com sold at auction for $802,500.

Samba.com was the most exciting expiry auction I’ve been following for a while. The domain name had once been owned by a company in Saudi Arabia, and it was auctioned on NameJet. Samba is a genre of music and a dance style that originated in Brazil. The descriptive term is used in branding by many companies around the world.

Before the auction, I was planning to bid and had set aside $50-75k in my mind to buy the domain name. I figured there was a somewhat reasonable chance I would be in contention, but I thought that would not likely be enough to win the domain name. I figured I would try and let the market decide if I would take the name home or not.