I buy and sell domain names often. At present, I own just over 4,500 premium dot com’s. It’s easy to make the mistake and fall in love with domain names, or convince yourself that domains are worth more than they truly are at the time. Most investors play a sit and wait game, but that can be quite riskly. Domain owners have to do a better job of promoting the domains they own. Its imperative to get maximum dollar. But carrying a large inventory like I do becomes costly. I went several years before ever selling or wanting to sell a single domain, but most of my acquisitions have been over the past 2 years. Up until then I only owned about 800 or so domains.
The problem with selling domains is that if all you do is park them you’re just waiting for the right guy or company to come along and buy them. If you post them for sale on sites like Sedo you’re competing with so many domain names that you’re domains are rarely seen. Once every now and then I realize its time to sell some domains to raise money to buy more domains. As time goes on I develop a number of the ones I really like in hopes of increasing their value even further. When I choose to sell there is no quicker sell than Ebay. But there’s also no quicker way to practically give your domains away than Ebay also.
With the maximum auction length on Ebay being 10 days its very difficult to get enough traffic from the right players to sell your domain at a price your truly proud of and glad to get. Most of the time your domain will sell at a steep discount to its true value. Correction … let me restate that. Almost all of the time you will never come close to reaching a domain name’s true value. There are a few exceptions, but they are indeed few.
An example of what I’m talking about occurred today. Two domains I felt would do very well went for peanuts. MSVistaTips.com and DotComBeach.com when for $5 and change plus $8.01 respectively. The two auction winners are indeed lucky souls. I sold the first domain because I didn’t want to own a domain that had a trademark attached to it. The second one I sold because it really didn’t fit the genre of anything I want to develop.
The lesson for you is this. Don’t ever think you can sell on Ebay and reap the true value of a domain. The few that do are lucky. You simply don’t get enough traffic from the right buyer during such a confined period of time. That said, you will still see me selling domains on Ebay from time to time because when I want to raise money quickly to purchase additional domains I don’t mind weeding off domains I don’t plan to develop or don’t feel are at the top of my value list.
