Up until about a month ago, I was never an active SnapNames user. At most, I may have been involved in five auctions over the course of three years, but I heard (and observed) some great sales that occurred on their platform. When I was made aware of a new beta test allowing ordinary people (like me) to auction names on SN, I was immediately intrigued. I wondered whether they would have more success selling my names than I had listing them in various forums and emailing my contacts. I decided to list a small group of decent names, and I didn’t set a reserve. I also listed one “premium” name, and I set a small reserve of $500. If it sold for the reserve price, I would take a loss, but domain investing is a gamble, so I rolled the dice.
To my surprise, a great number of my names sold! In fact, I had listed a group of them on another forum for $25/each to clear out some inventory less than two months before. My premium name sold for over $4,500 and had a bidding battle at the end. All in all, I have done two rounds of testing at SN, and here are the stats:
1) My sales rate on the domain names I submitted was 63%. Of the 30 names I submitted, 19 of them sold.
2) Of the 19 that sold, 63% of those sold for more than the $60 dollar reserve price.
In my opinion, at the present time, the only downsides to this program are the high rate of commission, currently 20%, and also the length of time it takes to disperse funds, sometimes up to a month. As I understand it, there aren’t any discounts on high value names, but a representative from SN may comment and confirm this or hopefully correct my error! All in all, the higher commission fee is worth it for the amount of names that were sold.
From what I heard, the manual process of reporting the auctions is going to become an automated process at the end of this month, which will allow me to view the names that are in auction and the number of bids. This is much easier than emailing the folks at SN – although to their credit, they always responded to me in a timely manner with the details I needed.
I just authorized a group of 60 names to be auctioned, and I will give an update once the auctions have finished. Based on the first two rounds of testing, I think they have a winning program!