Namecheap notified its Namecheap Market customers of an adjustment to the end times for auctions and a simplified process for its closeouts.

Domain name auctions will all end at the same time each day. The time is 11am Eastern Time and the equivalent times throughout the world. You can do the math to understand when auctions will close in your timezone. Auctions will still be extended by 5 minutes each time a bid is placed in the final five minutes of an auction.

Closeout auctions will also have a small change. If a closeout domain auction ends without any bids, the auction will automatically extend for an additional 24 hours with a minimum bid of $5. .AI domain names – which are marked “Partner” on the auction pages, are not considered closeouts, so this will not be applicable to those domain names.

The content of the email is below for those who did not receive it but are interested in understanding:

Namecheap was recently named expiry auction partner for .AI domain names. The first batch of expired .AI auctions concluded last week, and hundreds of .AI domain names were sold. Namebio shows 695 .AI sales on Namecheap worth nearly $800,000 in the last month, although I can’t filter down to specifically include the expiry auctions.

One of the things people noticed was the number of seemingly new bidders who participated in the auctions. The Namecheap Market platform has a pop-up indicating the activity level of each bidder. Visitors can hover over the badge next to each bidder nickname, and a popup highlights the bidder’s activity, along with their join date.

A general concern some people may have is that new bidders could be more likely to be non-paying bidders. Obviously, bidders who can’t/won’t pay could unfairly increase the final price for other participants. Whether these bidders would theoretically join to cause problems or simply have payment processing issues on the platform, non-paying bidders can increase the cost of domain names for genuine bidders.