Spend.com Caught by DropCatch (Updated)

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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 Expiry Auction Winning Bid was $143,000

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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.

How I Got Quick Delivery of GoDaddy (Private) Auction Wins

GoDaddy has been running a private auction featuring domain names from its NameFind portfolio. I have been following the auctions and bidding on a handful of domain names I like.

Yesterday, I won the auction for Molasses.com. As I shared on X, it was won, paid for, delivered, and a landing page was launched within a few hours. I want to share how I made that happen.

GoDaddy Auctions Testing $1 Expiry Auctions

Yesterday morning, I noticed a handful of expiry auctions on GoDaddy Auctions that had a $1 opening bid. The typical starting bid for these types of auctions is $25, so that caught my attention. Most of the other auctions I visited yesterday had the standard $25 opening bid.

I reached out to GoDaddy to ask about this anomaly, and a company representative confirmed this is a test. He was unable to provide additional details about the test, so I don’t know how long we are going to see $1 opening bids. I was told GoDaddy does quite a bit of testing across many variables. For instance, the commas in prices and estimated values across different GoDaddy services were recently removed as a short-lived test.

GoDaddy Doesn’t Always Automatically Refund for Canceled Auctions

In July of 2022, I was told about a GoDaddy change that was made with the hope of successfully delivering more GoDaddy Auction wins to customers. I believe the policy change is that if a GoDaddy registered domain name isn’t renewed 3 days before an expiry auction, it is no longer allowed to be renewed. I don’t bid on enough domain names to comment accurately, but by and large, it seems like I receive fewer refunds for GoDaddy Auctions wins.

When I buy a domain name, I list it on an Excel spreadsheet. If the domain name is not delivered instantly, I put a yellow highlight on the cell so I can keep track of it. Today, I scrolled up and saw a domain name I won at auction on October 27th was not delivered to my GoDaddy account. I paid for the domain name on October 30th. Two weeks is a long time for provisioning.

GoDaddy Auctions: “Improve chances of winning this domain!”

I was attempting to place bid on an auction at GoDaddy Auctions this morning when I was shown this message on the bid confirmation page.

My proxy bid amount was just above $100, and the GoDaddy Estimated Value was just shy of $2,000.