NameJet

I was observing the conclusion of a private auction I had running at NameJet the other day, when I received the following email from what appears to be a throw away email address:

Hello,

I have a web name, <domain redacted>, you may be interested in.

Since you already own <different domain redacted>, I thought you may be interested in owning this one as well.

This is over 10-years old and is comprised of premium seo keywords, which makes it very valuable.

My asking price is $2,888 only.

I intend to sell this soon, and have mailed several parties. If you are interested, please reply back at your earliest convenience.

Thanks,
John

There are three problems I see with this type of bogus email:

1) I own this domain name that was in a private auction, and the person who sent the email did not. Misrepresenting ownership like this is borderline criminal in my opinion.

2) Should someone else have won the auction at a higher price and decided to go out and sell it, he or she may have been hampered by this person’s efforts to sell the domain name at a lower price. Put simply, an end user won’t pay $10,000 for this name if it was offered to him for $2,888 the week prior, even if the original offer wasn’t legit.

3) If the emailer found a buyer who later did not pay, he may not have paid NameJet. In the case of a private auction, the seller and NameJet would lose out.

At the time of the email, the auction was selling for somewhere around $1,000, although the reserve price was not met. I should have agreed to buy the domain name and tried to initiate a transaction at Escrow.com to see who this person is, but I didn’t want to chance ruining my auction with a potential non-paying bidder.

Have you received similar emails to this? What are your thoughts?

For a number of years, Register.com partnered with SnapNames to auction and sell its expired domain names. Register.com was acquired by publicly-traded Web.com in 2010, and the company’s expired domain names will now be available via NameJet beginning this Thursday.

According to Christie Chute, Manager of Monetization and Aftermarket Sales at Web.com, the company has been testing NameJet with its private portfolio of domain names. “We’re really excited to have the opportunity to work closer with Matt and the NameJet platform,” said Chute. “We’ve seen great success using NameJet for our everyday/non-expiry auctions and I’m looking forward to the upcoming transition of our expiry names as well.

For SnapNames and its new owners, the writing has likely been on the wall for quite some time. Network Solutions has been a NameJet partner for several years, and like Register.com, Network Solutions was also recently acquired by Web.com in a deal that closed at the end of 2011.

NameJet released its May sales report, and it include sales that closed at $2,000 and above. The company sold nearly $400,000 worth of domain names, not including sales below the $2,000 mark. I am sure the number is over the half a million dollar mark when you consider all of the sales.

Here are the NameJet sales from May:

zuke.com 5/1/12 06:22 $40,188.00
tasting.com 5/28/12 09:40 $20,100.00
dailyhealth.com 5/3/12 09:22 $10,100.00
committed.com 5/21/12 19:40 $8,966.00
createandprotect.com 5/1/12 06:22 $8,333.00
indica.com 5/29/12 07:22 $8,301.00
domainloan.com 5/22/12 10:22 $8,200.00
freewhois.com 5/24/12 08:22 $8,088.00
personalinjurylawfirm.com 5/11/12 13:22 $7,550.00
stylemaker.com 5/17/12 13:22 $6,756.00
klear.com 5/3/12 06:22 $6,700.00
dedham.com 5/4/12 08:22 $6,536.00
topiary.com 5/6/12 21:22 $6,200.00
uploadfiles.com 5/29/12 07:22 $6,066.00
events.tv 5/19/12 16:22 $5,700.00
ripi.com 5/12/12 06:22 $5,400.00
yogatrainers.com 5/11/12 14:22 $5,000.00