Auction Sites Need to Go Mobile — Domain Name
Placing a last second bid on a mobile phone is difficult.
I’ve been watching the auction of 529.org on Sedo all week. As you may know, I own a web site related to 529 plans, so 529.org would be a great pickup for me. The auction ended at noon central time yesterday. I had a lunch meeting at the same time, so I decided I’d just login on my phone to place the bid. That didn’t work out so well. (I’m not a fan of leaving high proxy bids ahead of time, as it lets your competitors know that someone serious is in the game.)
Here’s how it turned out:
11:50: Pulled out my Treo and typed Sedo.com into the browser. It’s a huge page, and took a long time to load. Once it loaded I entered my username and password and logged in. That took me to the user dashboard.
11:53: I click on the “buy” link and click on auctions. Once I did that I had to click on “current marketplace auctions” to go to the whole list of auctions.
11:55: I scroll through dozens of auctions to find 529.org. Found it, and now I have 3 minutes to spare. I click the link and wait for the auction page to download. Excellent, now I can enter my bid…
11:57: Still waiting for the page to load. There it is. I entered my bid of $1,800 and hit submit. I looked at the clock and it was 11:58.
11:58: The confirmation page was loading…sweet, I got my bid in! Oh wait, I forgot that you then have to check a box on the confirmation page. Check the box, scroll down, click the confirmation button and…
It’s 12:00 and a few seconds. I lost the auction and someone got the domain for only $1,351. Bummer.
Sedo does have a mobile web site, but it just lists domains available at auction. It doesn’t appear that you can actually bid through the mobile site. TDNAM also has a mobile site. Domain marketplaces ought to optimize mobile bidding to increase sale prices (and create a lot less heartache.)
