Sedo Review - Best Blogs Asia
A look at one of the most popular domain parking and brokerage services on the net.
Sedo, the popular domain brokers and parking company have recently updated their site. I gave them a first hand test of what it’s like to park, buy and sell a domain using their services.
About Sedo
Recently I used Flippa for buying and selling domains and sites, with general success. However, Sedo is much bigger and seems to offer more protection (via hidden negotiations only through Sedo staff) as well as domain parking services. They have the global world’s largest database of high-quality domain names, which is thought to be over 3.0 million names.
Domain Parking
Afternic are probably their most well known competitors to park a domain, but how do Sedo fair?
Parking was very easy, I just pointed my nameservers to their site and waited for the clickthroughs. There was no fee or limitations on the number of domains and found the landing pages pretty generic but the value per click was pretty low. I rarely use a landing page unless I’ve a popular keyworded domain, but would think for monetising non US/UK traffic, using their landing page would be a good idea.
I didn’t try out the Sedo Pro program, so not sure if the stats/revenue would improve for domain parkers.
Benefits
- Payment via PayPal and Direct Deposit
- Parked domains can be marked “for sale” with keyword experts available to suggest improvements
- Potential buyers can see hits
Negatives
- You get paid for clicks only and never control or see the true value
- Revenues are very small or big, depending on your domain name
- Parked pages look like advertisement pages.
Domain Brokerage
A few weeks ago, I spotted a great domain and made a bid as the seller didn’t set a price. A few messages went back and forward from the Sedo control panel, where we finally agreed a price. However, I was surprised to find out that even though my bid was locked and accepted, the seller decided to initiate a 7 day auction where my bid would be visible and could be outbid at any time.
I sort of find this practice a bit disappointing and off-putting, if my bid was accepted I surely would get the domain…but instead I had to wait nervously to see if I’d be outbid at anytime. More money for Sedo and the seller I guess.
To speed things along, I actually won the domain, paid the total to Sedo who acts as the “middle man” and then waited for the owner to receive the money. I think received the domain from Sedo and everything was complete!
I found the positives were that both the seller and buyer were protected, the sale had to go through and generally everything went well. My only gripes would be all messages had to go through the brokerage team and there was a bit of a delay involved. There is also no rating system like on Flippa where you can see how many times a user has made transactions on the site as well as positive/negative feedback.
Conclusion
My general conclusion would be to use them as a place to buy and sell your names, since they offer alot of protection. In regards to parking, you won’t earn alot unless your domain is popular to begin with and you’ll get frustrated with the lack of controls so I’d probably look at Google Parking directly.
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