About a week ago, I placed a $1,750 bid on a domain name via Sedo, and the owner sent a counter offer. The name had been listed for a BIN price of my offer, and was changed just prior to my bid, so I wasn’t interested in paying more, and I didn’t bother to check the counter offer.

Yesterday, I received an email from Sedo that was confusing to me. The email read:

Dear Elliot Silver,

We write to remind you of the offer of 23000 $US that was recently submitted for domain [redacted].

Please login to your Sedo account to negotiate or complete the sale.
Please don’t delay; offers are only binding for seven days.”

When I first read the email, I thought it was a phishing attempt because it didn’t read very well. I know Sedo is based in Germany, but when targeting the US market, the company should consider having one of its US-based staff pen the email. It might seem silly, but $US is not commonly written, so that also threw me off.

In addition to the grammar issues, the email was a bit confusing to me, possibly because I didn’t know about the $23,000 counter offer. In my opinion, it would have been more clear if the email mentioned it was a counter offer.

My suggestion would be to send this: “We write to remind you of the counter offer of $xx,xxx that was recently submitted for [domain name].”

I appreciate the fact that Sedo has added the amount to the email, but I think the wording needs to be changed.

Sedo  released its Q3 2012 domain market study this morning, and as usual, it’s filled with interesting insight from the company. Because Sedo probably sells the highest volume of aftermarket domain names, the information shared is fairly indicative  of the health of the domain market.

I want to share some highlights from the market study (also called the market report), and you can download the pdf on Sedo’s website  to read the report in its entirety.

Q3 2012 Market Study highlights: