After a few months of acquiring higher-quality domains, I have decided to give Sedo’s GreatDomains.com auction a shot! The auction starts today, February 18th, at 12pm EST and runs for exactly one week. For this February installment of the GreatDomains auction I have the domain ZUY.net up for grabs with NO RESERVE! That’s right, a CVC.net domain with absolutely no reserve. Place your bids now!

You may be wondering why so many of my blog posts focus on selling domains at Bido. Well, the truth is that Bido has become my largest avenue for generating income.

]]> http://ruraltechnocrat.com/2010/02/04/big-sales-at-bido/feed/ 4 http://ruraltechnocrat.com/2010/01/10/bido-vote-for-profit-success-and-a-busy-week/ http://ruraltechnocrat.com/2010/01/10/bido-vote-for-profit-success-and-a-busy-week/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:40:48 +0000 Cole http://ruraltechnocrat.com/?p=228

Here is to 2010!!?

For the past few weeks I have been promoting my new photography site using Twitter, Facebook and email. It only makes sense to use Rural Technocrat as an avenue to share some of my work – check it out at ColeMason.ca!

If you have read my domain-related posts in the past you surely know that I am a big proponent of the domain auction site, Bido. As a buyer, I have bought a few dozen nice domains at great prices and as a seller I have had an excellent ROI. Well, I am happy to report that the Bido staff have significantly upgraded their site to include new features such as Buy It Now, BidoPrice, Vote for Profits, the ability to negotiate with buyers/sellers and an all-new, and more informative, listing layout across the tabs.

I would like to touch on my favourite new feature, Vote for Profits, so if you would like more detail on the other features check out Sahar Sarid’s post on his blog, Conceptualist.

For me, an active Bido user, the Vote for Profits feature is both appealing and largely unique. All members of the Bido platform are given 100 votes each month (more can be purchased with Bido credits) with which the member can award 1 to 3 votes to domain looking for the 10 necessary votes to make it to auction. Depending on when the votes are awarded, the voter is entitled to a share of the sale of that domain! This financial incentive to vote will not only encourage previous non-voters to participate, but it should also ensure that domains of quality are those that go to auction.

For more on the Vote for Profits program, check out Bido.com/VoteForProfits.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Bido update with a little GUI streamlining! I am a big fan of the more informative and expandable method of listing all of the domains in each tab. Check out the screenshot below!

I would like to conclude by congratulating the Bido team on a job well done!

Thanks to the advancement of the Web, it is possible for anyone to share their experience with the corporate world – be it positive or negative. Many of my posts in the past have focused on the positive, but sadly it is time to turn the table.

Last week, we received the monthly cable/Internet statement, but this time something was different. Cogeco, a Canadian telecommunications firm, had charged us $31.50 for exceeding our bandwidth limit by 40.74GB in October of this year. I scrambled to the Internet usage section of the Cogeco Web portal to see that the statement did match their records. What was more interesting was that the usage did not fit our bandwidth patterns. For instance, in August of ‘09 we used 37GB with 31GB in September, 100GB in October and 50GB in November.

Earlier this year Cogeco instituted an automated service that would send email warnings to customers as they reached both 85% and 100% of the monthly bandwidth cap – in May we received such a warning regarding 85% so we adjusted our usage to accommodate. I should note at this point that in May the online bandwidth monitoring tool was not functional. While I am personally against bandwidth caps, I think that such notifications are a realistic necessity for implementing a bandwidth cap. Unfortunately, after going through old emails, no notification from the month of October was found.

Let’s move forward to today, December 3 2009, when we called Cogeco support to dispute the charge as the October overage did not reflect our monthly pattern nor were we notified. The agent was firm in stating that there was nothing that could be done as it was our responsibility to monitor the bandwidth. Furthermore, we were unsuccessful at convincing the agent to let us converse with a supervisor regarding the matter.

While I respect the firmness of the agent, I see a few fundamental business mistakes in the approach:

Loyal customer. We have been loyal Cogeco customers for 11 years with both high-speed Internet and cable service subscriptions throughout our tenure. At the moment our monthly bill is $123.94, but let’s assume we have had an average bill (conservatively) of $100 over the 11 years. This represents $13 200 in revenue to Cogeco over that time period. Surely the agent must have known our tenure and the number of services we use from the telecom firm.

In fact, we have been on the fence with adding an additional service, Cogeco Phone, which would add an additional $39.99+ to our monthly bill.

Internal education. The agent repeatedly said that nothing could be done in regards to the charge. Anyone with that has either worked in a call centre or has business experience always knows that something can be done. If the agent could not do anything to further explain the situation, they should have passed the call onto someone more experienced with such an issue – perhaps a supervisor.

Beware of churn. Throughout the conversation with the agent, we said that if this is how they treat their loyal customers we would have to consider switching both of our services to Bell. One of the basic principles in business is that it is far more cost effective to maintain a current customer than gain a new one. Does Cogeco really want to lose our business over a $31.50 charge? Additionally, in the telecom business it is not only that one firm loses a customer, but that a competitor will gain one.

Fun fact – my employment at Bell, a direct Cogeco competitor

I worked as a product analyst with Bell Internet (then Sympatico) with much of my work focusing on bandwidth analysis. While we were concerned with bandwidth usage, we rarely pursued action against customers unless they were grossly abusing the service. Say, downloading more than 1TB on a 60GB/month plan – even then it was generally a warning the first time. *Please note that I am currently note employed by Bell and they very well may be charging for bandwidth overages regularly now*

Additionally, when call centre agents conversed with customers over billing issues the ARPU (average revenue per user) and years of continual service were always present so that the agent could determine how important that customer is to the business – essentially, a measure of loyalty. I firmly believe that a $31.50 charge would have been quickly dropped by other telecoms.

What should have been done. If I were a manager/director with Cogeco involved in implementing bandwidth overage charges I would have focused on notifying/educating first-time offenders. Rather than charging those that exceed the limits the first time, notify them on the monthly statement that they could have been charged $xx.xx for going over the limit by xxGB, but that the charges will be dropped as this was the first time going over.

At this point I would like to say that I am aware that some readers will ask why I am going this far over a measly $31.50 charge. Essentially, I have issues with their business practices regarding bandwidth caps. I have been on the other side before and there is definitely a better way to handle bandwidth limits. This is not a matter of $31.50, it is a matter of being a loyal customer with an very negative experience.

It is time that organizations understand that it takes a lot to gain new customers, but it takes very little to lose those most loyal. Cogeco, now is your time to make it right before it’s too late.

I realize that I have been posting far too much about Bido recently, so I will try to tone that down – after this post! As I had some moderate success selling two domains at Bido in early October, I thought I should pursue the platform more aggressively. In the past two weeks I have had a sales ratio of exactly 50% with 10 successful sales thus far. Below are the profit and return statistics from these sales.

LLN.com $8.18 = 5.1%
LLL.info (single premium) $20.48 = -41.8%
LLL.info (double premium) $27.57 = -35.6%
LLLL.com (triple premium) $10.76 = 71.7%
LLLL.com (triple premium) $10.76 = 71.7%
LNL.com – $0.92 = 0.8%
LNL.net (acronym made sense) $20.69 = 345.4%
[Uber-premium Word].cc $170.61 = 948.4%
[Single word].org $23.57 = 1076.3%
LLLL.tv (single word) $2.24 = -8.0%

Overall, my profit for these ten sales was $195.20, representing an overall return of 40.4% over the purchase price. It is important to note that I have held ALL of these domains for less than 3 months and many of them were acquired in the last two weeks. Sure, I am still a small player, but no one can argue with a 40.4% return in such a short period of time.

The losses are unfortunate, but the LLL.info market has dropped substantially in the last month or two and even great .TV domains are not selling too well at Bido these days – hopefully that changes soon. On the bright side, when I sold those two LLL.info’s and for a lost, I managed to snag two LLL.info’s ($43 for one and $28 for the other) as well as a LNL.com for $88.

Be sure to swing by the Bido chat and say hi to cmason!

After the success of last week, I decided to auction another ten domains at Bido this week – most of which occur this Tuesday, November 10th. Based on Bido results, I truly expect all of these domains to sell, some at a very healthy price. If you are interested in bidding, I encourage you to follow the links below to place your pre-bid.

Monday, November 9nd
1 of 2 sold.

Tuesday, November 10th
3 of 6 sold.

Thursday, November 12th
2 of 3 sold.

Friday, November 13th
Alone(.)tv – 1:13PM EST

Yesterday was a dark day for the major domain industry player Oversee.net as one of their companies, SnapNames, exposed a massive fraud. SnapNames VP of Engineering, Nelson Brady, was caught “shill” bidding on many tens-of-thousands of domain auctions, since early 2005, under the alias “halvarez”. This should be big news in itself, but the real kicker is that the domain community asked for his head many, many times over the last 4 years.

Personally, I feel that fraud represents a substantial blow to the entire credibility of Oversee. Could this be the end of SnapNames? That is definitely possible. Rather than rehash the story, I would like to provide you with links to my favourite coverage of the issue. Stay tuned, as this is going to be something to watch over the next year.

DNJournal’s “Lowdown” complete with photos of the fraudster | Link
DotWeekly’s take on the Halvarez/Brady situation | Link
Bruce Marler’s post on the bigger picture of what could happen to the industry | Link

There are many more articles to be found and a wealth of information to be shared from the forums, so be sure to dig deep if you are as interested in this scandal as I.