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Our Sedo Commision: -100 £

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I know we've all asked repeatedly about this value but is there any chance in 2006 that sedo will change its commision structure for UK domain names?

thanks
 
I get offers all the time for £110-£130 and would NOT sell the names for the £10-£30 i would get.

However if sedo changed it to 10% , i would happily have sold those names with commision of £99-£117.

Even if worse case they just droped it to £50 min fee i would still sell more names than i do now.

They must be missing out on lots of sales.

On the flip side £100 for very little work (99% of the time) must make them a nice tidy sum ;)

an update from sedo would be welcome.
 
I Doubt it. More likely, they'll stay in the long line [just behind iTunes etc] of outfits that treat Britain as "Treasure Island" and continue to add a premium to anything that relates to the UK market ... simply because they feel that they can get away with it. Our utter sh/thouse Govt. makes it easy for such policies by seeming to favour the rights of corporations over those of consumers.

As a nation, we are too laissez-faire to do anything about such corporate misbehaviour. I'd like to see a national "Stop taking the piss" march in 2006

You've probably gathered that you've touched a raw nerve with this one!

---
"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way"
Pink Floyd - Time
 
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singlefile said:
As a nation, we are too laissez-faire to do anything about such corporate misbehaviour. I'd like to see a national "Stop taking the piss" march in 2006

YES!! Totally agree.
 
I'm getting so fed up of high prices in this country, I'm thinking of moving to eastern europe, you get ripped off with everything. I doubt people would mind the high prices if their wages went up by the same amount all over the country.

Occasionally friends joke that I should get a proper job and my reply is normally, "what on the wages they're offering? haha £12,000 a year whoopeee" can people still live on that ten years on? no wonder 10 million people are under the proverty line in this country and 4 million can't afford to eat properly."

And yes it's a well known fact the foreigners rip the British off and get away with it but so do most business, put a replica shirt together for £2.50 in asia and sell it for £35.00. We may as well make clothes and goods ourselves if the end product is going to be just as expensive. Somehow changing our economy the way government has and making us a more civilised work force rather than labour intensive has gone horribly wrong.

And with regards the american economy, when you hear New Orleans police were on £7,000 a year and that clothes are cheaper, you do wonder which government takes the mick with their citizens the most... as big business racks up billion pound profits.

Clothes in America cost half what we pay, somehow I don't think it's Brown's £3 tax on a £5 pack of cigarettes which are made in England and sold in Hungary for £1.60 that makes all these goods five times dearer than elsewhere.

It's probably as already stated, we just move out of the country, stop spending, stop doing expensive activities such as catching a train instead of writing to MPs and complaining. but then again to another country and a shopping centre and clothes prices haven't changed much because they're run by C&A and the like and imported, but og further out and you'll find that country's proper prices.

Sedo's prices may be a way of inflating domain sales, there's many reasons why some believe the UK market to be stagnant but if we all revealed why, we wouldn't achieve our aims over the next few years if we succeed.

But £100 does seem a bit much but then if you break that down to £2 on postage and £35 on transfer forms (unless they get a deal?) and £5 for an hour's labour, fair enough I think - that's a profit of £58 on domain sales that go for small amounts.

Whereas you'd think the domain sales that are above £500 and £1000 would cover the smaller sales. And does anyone know why domains sell in dollars and euro when the best value you can get on sedo for the 10000 price mark is in sterling? or is it the opposite and dollar and euro sellers bluff the buyer into thinking they're getting a bargain but hike the price a little?

---
One thing I find funny about internet companies especially sedo, is the way they don't like to consult exchange rates. 39 euros = $39 is just one example but I guess you can choose the lowest at that time. Is that why they do it?
 
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LeeOwen said:
But £100 does seem a bit much but then if you break that down to £2 on postage and £35 on transfer forms (unless they get a deal?) and £5 for an hour's labour, fair enough I think - that's a profit of £58 on domain sales that go for small amounts.

On the one hand you complain about low wages and getting ripped off, on the other you expect a professional domain industry person (so far, all my dealings with Sedo have been with relatively clued-in professional folks) to work for £5 an hour? With their expertise, that's an order of magnitude out...

I don't particularly like the high fee on .co.uk domains, but I get around it by never selling that low. Once you factor in the unavoidable Nominet transfer fees as well as the hassle of filling out and posting the documentation, I'm surprised anyone sees a vibrant market in the sub-few-hundred pound region!
 
£5 an hour? I was being generous, it takes five minutes to look at forms so valuing that bit of work as a business cost and an employee's time at £5 is ok. I think it's just the way some internet businesses value their work. On Sedo there's different rates for different services, no set fee.

Some may feel disaffected when seeing that if you park your domain with sedo you're allowed the 10% only fee but if you're uk it's £100 minimum. Without going into how much the '10% only fee' allowed countrys pay for transfers etc and the process I don't know how fair that is.

And I'm not sure where their staff are based and in which country so couldn't tell you whether it's an east germany 1 euro an hour job or a British high tech £25 an hour job or a British minimum government wage of £5 an hour position. Such is capitalism... :D you never know they could be in asia, all clued up and on £2 a week or in east africa with an internet connection and a malaria net.

But you're quite right, I wouldn't sell a domain at present for a low fee and give sedo the opportunity of charging me £100. That may change in the future but not right now.
 
Hi everyone,
I was just browsing through Acorn this morning and came across this post – thought I’d chime in to clear up a few “domain myths” about the .co.uk transfers at Sedo.

I know the fee for .uk transfers seems unfair, but .uk is a ccTLD. ccTLDs are more time- and labour-intensive than for example, .com transfers. You would be surprised by the number of people who bid on .uk domains over Sedo, without realizing that there is more to it than simply sitting back and waiting for the ownership to change. Our transfer agents guide both parties through the Nominet system and oversee the entire process. Most of the delays come from either the buyer/seller delaying the paperwork, which means the transfer agents have to chase up the missing documents and "encourage" the guilty party to send in the papers. The same is true of .es domain transfers, .fr domain transfers etc.

Not one single .uk transfer from last year took “one hour” or less – the average length of time for a .uk transfer in 2005 was 22 days.
That’s 22 days. Reason for delay: see aforementioned paperwork
The average length of time for a .com transfer is 4 days.
It has nothing to do with inflating domain prices – it is simple economics, I’m afraid.

We are, by the way, based in Cologne-Germany and Boston-US. Neither cities are exactly cheap to operate in :) so rest assured that the eh, foreigners, are not living the easy life. All of us, even here in Germany have to pay taxes.

At our get together in London, which some of you attended, we made a solemn promise, that once Nominet upgrade their system to render all the paperwork unnecessary, we will reduce the transfer fee for some ccTLDs. We reduced it from 150 GBP/EUR/USD to 100 last year and are more than willing to reduce it again, once the associated costs can also be reduced. The only way to reduce the associated costs is to work with a simpler transfer system.

Having spoken to Nominet, they tell me they are currently restructuring and that a simpler and more effective transfer process is in the works. I’ll be at some of the Nominet meetings this year, so I look forward to hearing about their progress on that – hope to see some of you there.

BTW – have to agree re the high prices! It’s exactly the same in Ireland. Was home over Christmas and paid nearly 6 EUR for a pint in Dublin. 6 EUR!!! Madness! I’ll be in London on Monday, so I’m sure more of the same awaits me there :)

Wishing you all a peaceful and prosperous New Year!
Warm regards,
Nora Cotter
 
"Not one single .uk transfer from last year took “one hour” or less – the average length of time for a .uk transfer in 2005 was 22 days."

Please don't misunderstand me, your staff aren't sitting around for 22 days waiting around to complete one job. £5 is my estimate, the cost to your business for that one job, it could be £10, you certainly don't lose money do you? well you could be, but if it cost £110 to sort a UK transfer, then you might be doing people a deal by offsetting that with the higher sales already.

If it takes ten minutes to check over forms, that's 6 jobs an hour, £60.00 max, so that one employee turned over £600.00 in that hour, average working day of seven hours, that one employee turned over £3,000 in income that day or around £2436 in gross profit from processing 42 UK domain transfers but I should think one of your staff does more than 42 (differing domains) a day, then again they could multi task... who's to know, all guesswork on our part.

It's a business that you command until and by your own admission, you still have no real rival, so you can charge what you want, how you want. And of course domain sales is only one part, there's highlights, valuations and a paid for negotiating service alongside parking and PPC of course.

Only sedo know whether they make more from minimum sales than high sales. A basic £100 / 100 euro / $100 fee suggests they're either wasting their time doing exchange of forms for that cheap domain or a lot of mimimum sales get processed and it can be quite a profitable process, either way you need to make a profit on each situation and one of those horrible little grubby £50 domains could go for several thousand - worth several hundred to you, so it's worth keeping low domains on offer in the long term.

As for a desk job in Germany or Boston I wouldn't know what that pays. But such is world economics at the moment it could be as high or as low as anything.

A pint in the republic is £4? that's quite cheap, I thought it was £5.50. If Stella is a your poison in London then that's £2.50. The world is mad, prices keep going up for everything yet most wages stay the same. I should go to university and learn economics then I can go round ripping people off who can't afford to live. :D

£100 charge isn't a lot but it if you were willing to sell a domain for £50 you wouldn't sell it through sedo would you? because if the buyer is willing to pay an extra £100 you're not going to wish to lose that £100, so you charge £100 more but then you think no this is wrong...

So it's really a case of would you earn more by dropping the fee and going to 10% or willing to stay on the same road until Nominet reduce their system to paperless - and you'd be expecting them to reduce their charge as well I'm sure so that you could in turn...

Also another tangent I advertise a domain in sterling because I can get a better rate of return on 10,000 pound than I can 10,000 euro or dollars but then when it comes to your fee, you get a better sum from sterling than dollar or euro so I should perhaps use the latter.

Then again, what does a person using the dollar or euro think is a big or small amount? What does a French person think of £6,000 compared to 6000 euros when seeing something for sale? There's another bit I don't understand. For instance I know that when a product is $30 somewhere else but costs £25 here that I'm getting a bargain at $30. So it's not unusual to see the same item offered in a different country at a different price, so why should domains be different?

It'll be easier when brussels force us to join europe and we all have the same coinage 'sterling' :rolleyes: from the Faroe Islands to Israel.

Just resurrecting an earlier question, why do internet companies not justify their prices by using a currency exchange rate? Why do you believe £100 equals $100 equals 100 euros? it doesn't in reality.
 
LeeOwen said:
But £100 does seem a bit much but then if you break that down to £2 on postage and £35 on transfer forms (unless they get a deal?) and £5 for an hour's labour, fair enough I think - that's a profit of £58 on domain sales that go for small amounts.

First, Sedo do not pay any Nominet charges - that is all profit for Sedo.

LeeOwen said:
If it takes ten minutes to check over forms, that's 6 jobs an hour, £60.00 max

Second, You grossly overestimate the quality of Sedo's transfer process - they don't look over the forms. They just respond to your chase email by sending the buyer an email. Very difficult, time consuming stuff - not.

Edwin said:
(so far, all my dealings with Sedo have been with relatively clued-in professional folks)

I'm happy for you. That is not my experience.



Sedo said:
Not one single .uk transfer from last year took “one hour” or less – the average length of time for a .uk transfer in 2005 was 22 days.
That’s 22 days. Reason for delay: see aforementioned paperwork
The average length of time for a .com transfer is 4 days

Most (90%) of my purchases outside of Sedo take just a few minutes, dot coms or dot co.uks. Occasionally longer but never 22 days.

Followup paperwork takes as long as follow up paperwork takes and that is not a variable that is affected by Sedo.


I understand however, that most of their profit comes from the parking revenue that they take off you and not really the sales side, so they probably just consider the 100 pounds as 'easy juice' from the unenlightened.

They still haven't said why a transaction priced in sterling should cost almost twice as much as a transaction priced in dollars. Surely there is NO extra effort involved because of the currency.



-aqls-
 
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Hi there,
Thanks for all the feedback.
We have no immediate plans to reduce the cost of .uk transfers any further. Once the Nominet transfer system is simplified, we will. That's all I can promise you. There seems to be very varied responses to the current fee.

Do many of you go to the Nominet meetings?
How many of you have sold a .uk domain for 50 GBP-100 GBP at/outside of Sedo?

Regards,
Nora
 
Whats going to be the diffence to Sedo whether the .co.uk transfer is electronic via nominets web site or manual paper posting?
 
sedo said:
We have no immediate plans to reduce the cost of .uk transfers any further.
But WHAT ABOUT THE CONVERSION RATE?
$ != £
What about a standard (low) fee related to the dollar rate for instance.
At least you answered the question albeit confirming what we expected of you.

sedo said:
Once the Nominet transfer system is simplified, we will. That's all I can promise you.
Nominet is not the problem.

sedo said:
There seems to be very varied responses to the current fee.
Though universally negative.

sedo said:
Do many of you go to the Nominet meetings?
See above.

sedo said:
How many of you have sold a .uk domain for 50 GBP-100 GBP at/outside of Sedo?
Not really your business, but since you asked - A LOT more than through Sedo.

-aqls-
 
Now now guys - I think some of you are being a little over critical here.

I agree that Sedo's minimum commission can be extremely frustrating when it comes to sub £500 offers, but they are a business at the end of the day.

For that £100 you get a buyer, a secure escrow service and a well managed transfer. All of my dealings with the Sedo transfers team have been very smooth.

Nominet will be launching their electronic transfer system at some point this year which should speed up the turnaround time of transfers (especially international deals). Once this goes live I'm sure we'll see Sedo lower their commission to 10% across the board.
 
sedo said:
Hi there,
Thanks for all the feedback.
We have no immediate plans to reduce the cost of .uk transfers any further. Once the Nominet transfer system is simplified, we will. That's all I can promise you. There seems to be very varied responses to the current fee.

Do many of you go to the Nominet meetings?
How many of you have sold a .uk domain for 50 GBP-100 GBP at/outside of Sedo?

Regards,
Nora


If this is the case is there any chance you can change your UK advertising strategy to not include the "no minimum commission" and stop rubbing it in by showing us that the rest of the world get just not us!

Just to make it worse that offer is available in the UK but not for UK domains?

We've been told by sedo that there is high demand for UK domains - surely this would be a good reason to knock the commission down?

Thanks
 
My question to sedo is this - why can you do .co.uk domain transfers for a minimum of $100 if the domain is priced in dollars yet if the domain is priced in pounds it costs a minimum of £100? I think it proves that uk domains can be handled profitably by sedo for a little over £50. I'm one who's tried pricing our domains in dollars and it doesn't work - you just end up with silly starting bids and prices never reach the same levels. So if sedo were able to offer us a price of £50 for .co.uk sales that would be good enough for me :)
 
Nigel said:
My question to sedo is this - why can you do .co.uk domain transfers for a minimum of $100 if the domain is priced in dollars yet if the domain is priced in pounds it costs a minimum of £100? I think it proves that uk domains can be handled profitably by sedo for a little over £50. I'm one who's tried pricing our domains in dollars and it doesn't work - you just end up with silly starting bids and prices never reach the same levels. So if sedo were able to offer us a price of £50 for .co.uk sales that would be good enough for me :)

Absolute agree - I always price in dollars to avoid the higher charge but clearly 99% of the time it would be better to work in pounds.

Stephen.
 
senior moment

Jarrod said:
Now now guys - I think some of you are being a little over critical here.

I agree that Sedo's minimum commission can be extremely frustrating when it comes to sub £500 offers, but they are a business at the end of the day.

For that £100 you get a buyer, a secure escrow service and a well managed transfer. All of my dealings with the Sedo transfers team have been very smooth.

Nominet will be launching their electronic transfer system at some point this year which should speed up the turnaround time of transfers (especially international deals). Once this goes live I'm sure we'll see Sedo lower their commission to 10% across the board.

So I should sell for 150 pounds and pay a 100 pound fee?
 
Nora

What do Sedo do to transfer a domain?

What is Sedo hourly charging rates?

I understand there is a £30 fee, is that included in the £100?

Second, You grossly overestimate the quality of Sedo's transfer process - they don't look over the forms. They just respond to your chase email by sending the buyer an email. Very difficult, time consuming stuff - not.

If this is the case £70 is highly questionable.

On the question of pound/dollor/euro conversion is it legal?

Re: Ash (Sedo) Selling a domain thread

We are currently looking into the issue of minimum commission in Euros vs. GBP. Hopefully, we'll have some progress on this in the near future. I can't promise anything, but I'm optimistic.

Re: Nora (Sedo)
We have no immediate plans to reduce charges

WTF?
 
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Just to clear things up, Nora's post is several days old. Since then however, we have started looking into the issue. Progress is being made folks.


Ash
 
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