Buying domain off ebay

thesmileyone · Apr 3, 2012

Theres a domain I am interested in on EBAY UK.

Presuming I win the auction, what stops the seller from scamming me?

How does the process work?

Many thanks!

Nova · Apr 3, 2012

Quick answer, not a lot really but if you buy from a seller with good feedback you should be okay and if you are paying pay by PayPal you should be able to claim your money back. I won and paid for 3 recently which I received with no problems, but I won another which the seller refused to deliver because I was the only bidder and they didn't get what they wanted for it. I was disappointed and probably could have took it up in the small claims court but its not really worth the hassle so I just left negative feedback and moved on instead.

stellar73 · Apr 3, 2012

Is it a .uk name you're trying to buy?

If so you will probably have to educate the seller about the Nominet transfer process as they will need to transfer the name through Nominet in order for you to become the legal owner (this only applied to .uk names) http://www.nominet.org.uk/registrants/maintain/transfer/Process/

The last time I looked at domain names on Ebay (which albeit, was some time ago) none of the sellers mentioned anything about Nominet whatsoever although I think this is just ignorance more than anything else as most people think they just need to do it through their registrar's control panel.

There is a fee of £12 inc vat to do this which can either be paid by the buyer or seller so be aware of this too if you aren't already.

philipp · Apr 3, 2012

thesmileyone said:
Presuming I win the auction, what stops the seller from scamming me?

Read up on escrow services. These are third parties who you can engage to control the financial aspect of a deal. Sedo offers such a service for 3% of the fee being transferred, there are plenty of others too.

Escrow.com is good for high-value transfers, I can only speak for their service when transferring .com domains though.

P.

thesmileyone · Apr 4, 2012

It was this, which for £16 I thought was a bargain, but I didnt win it in the end.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WWW-BIGSW...Services&hash=item3f158b58bf&autorefresh=true

I thought it was an ideal name for a swimming costume/swimming pool business (affiliate), affiliate sites being something completely new to me at the moment!