I just received an email from Godaddy.com that they are making a change to the closing rules on the Godaddy.com domain auction platform, which is to take place on Monday, 7/14/2014.
“As it stands now, any bid that is placed in the last 5 minutes of an auction auto-extends the auction by 5 minutes.”
“This will change to auto-extend to only 1 minute, and a maximum time of 5 minutes 59 seconds (5:59).”
“For example, if you place a bid on an auction that has 4:30 left, it will auto-extend this auction to 5:30.”
Personally I’m not sure why they are doing this, seems as it will only lead to more bid snipping and wind up with lower sales prices.
I am also not sure why they waited until after 5pm EST on a Friday to notify customers of the change that takes place on Monday.
I just got this additional information from Godaddy:
“Any bid that increases the current price will auto extend the auction as it always has. We are making it so that a bidder who increases their proxy wont trigger the autoextend because the current price wont update. Moving from a (5m + current time left) end time to just 5-6 minutes max should not increase sniping and still gives bidders time to get a new bid in.”
I guess we will just have to see what happens on Monday
“[It will only lead to more bid snipping and wind up with lower sales prices.”
100% agree.
A very strange decision. Unless GoDaddy wants to snipe its own auctions, they can probably only lose by this change.
…they more than likely bounced that thought around their collective heads before making this decision. There may be another idea driving this decision that balances it….
they keep playing with this..it was 3 minutes for the longest time then they changed it to 20 minutes, people complained and they changed it to 5 minutes now this. whats next?
I like it. Before this last 5 minute increase the auctions used to be extended by only 2 minutes. I got lots of great domains by bidding in the last few seconds. (plus it was fun) Bid at 10 seconds and it only goes to 2:10. Some had time to get back to their computers in that 2 minute time frame. Now they will only have one minute to get back to their computers. Game On!
Hello MHB,
ICAN or ICANN actually you can manipulate infiltrate immasculate and ICANN as an oversite is a joke, getting almost impossible to control what they say they have over sight of. The good is its unregulated, the bad is its unregulated. Its a shoot out at the OK corral with no law in sight.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Domain Master)
Hi all, let me clarify a bit if I may:
Any bid that changes the current price of an auction will extend the time left of that auction to at least 5 minutes. If the bid is placed with between 4 and 5 minutes left then the auction will extend 1 minute, pushing it beyond 5. At no time will an auto extension move the time left to less than 5 minutes.
The reason we are making the change is because we noticed that users who were currently the high bidders would trip the auto-extension logic just by increasing their proxy bid price. The change was made in order to make sure that an actual increase in current bid price is the only thing that trips the auto-extend. As we were handling the logic for that change we found that we could also fix something else that was bugging me, which was the situation where a bid early in the last 5 minutes, say at 4m 30s left would trigger a full 5 minute increase, pushing the end time out to 9m 30s. This can make the end of auctions drag on and I have received complaints about this in the past. So, we bundle a fix to make sure that an auto-extension doesn’t go beyond 6 minutes at any point (but it always goes to at least 5m).
Hope that clears things up, sorry for the confusion.
-Paul
@Paul,
That makes more sense.
Thanks Joseph, if nothing else I try to at least make sense once a week.
Domain exchanges need standard procedures that clearly enhance transactions not hinder them. Till this happens its bad business protocol.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Domain Master)