Another Day, Another Domain Missed

Despite selling website businesses on eBay, I haven’t really used it much for purchasing domain names to develop into online businesses. However, the last couple of weeks have seen me miss out on two great domains to other eBay users.

The most recent domain I missed out on was the highly brandable British.tv which was listed on eBay.com. I don’t usually visit the dot com version of eBay but had listed a few domain names of my own that I wanted rid of so decided to take a look around and see what was on offer.

The domain name had been bid up to around the $500 mark with several hours to go and I was ready to bid and perhaps pay up to $1,000 or so. However, with a couple of hours remaining on the auction, the eventual winner had bid it up to over $5,000 and there was no way I was prepared to pay that amount for a domain I wasn’t too bothered about either way.

The domain name I am really annoyed about not winning, however, is WestHamUnited.com, which went for £720 on Bank Holiday Monday a few weeks ago. The domain was first registered in 1998 and had never dropped. I had planned to create a West Ham fan website which would have received loads of type-in traffic and would not have taken much effort to rank well naturally in the search engines.

I was the winning bidder at around the £200 mark with seven minutes to go, but with just a matter of seconds left on the clock, my top bid of £400 was smashed by a winning bid of £700. In hindsight I would have probably paid up to around £750 for the domain which could have been turned into a website worth five figures inside 12 months and I regret not putting in a higher maximum bid.

I haven’t looked on eBay for further domain names, but the two examples in this post prove that little gems can be found on there from time to time.

On a more positive note, I managed to purchase what I believe to be two very brandable domain names for just £5 each at another online marketplace and I will using them to create web businesses to sell very soon.