auctions Archive

Yesterday the domain name sales service from Sitepoint was split and renamed as Flippa. Sitepoint members were notified of the change earlier this month and auctions were transferred to Flippa yesterday.

On the Sitepoint forum, most of the feedback has been negative so far. Of course it’s important to note that people will always speak out about any change – just see any Facebook change for a good example. Flippa charges a new ”success” fee (similar to the final value fee that eBay charges) which ranges from $10-$500 depending on the final value of the sale. This fee along with the “web 2.0 bubbly look” account for the majority of the negative comments.

The most interesting comment comes from SitePoint Co-founder Mark Harbottle who notes:

Meanwhile while you all whine and complain about the fees, the design, etc. the smart sellers are listing their sites on flippa.com and they are attracting the majority of the buyer interest. They will also get the added benefit of the PR we’re about to roll out.

So, it’s totally up to you! If you want to come across to flippa and sell your site in the professional marketplace we’re creating for serious buyers, we welcome you with open arms. If not, please do go to digitalpoint. List your site for free and see if the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies.

Pretty shocking to see Mark call his customers “whiners and complainers” and offer them to leave and go to DigitalPoint. Especially considering Mark wants them to pay an extra fee on their sales. I guess time will tell if Flippa becomes another huge success for Sitepoint like their split of 99designs has apparently become.

Update: I’ve received the following note from Mark:

I’ll stop by here Allen. Perhaps a poor choice of words, but I stand by message…

There are plenty of free alternatives to Flippa to sell low end, low quality web sites. What we’re building is a quality marketplace where over 30% of the sites listed sell, and where thousands of serious cashed-up buyers frequent daily.

Sure, we charge a slight premium to list ($19 listing fee plus 5% success fee), but we’re not the most expensive in this space — you’ll find that many of the domain name marketplaces charge 10% or more. In terms of the design, it’s a subjective thing, but we are looking at making some minor tweaks to it.

We do take comments from our customers seriously. In fact all of our customers were personally invited to our beta launch several weeks ago and were encouraged to provide feedback. A cross section of our frequent users were also invited to our private alpha several months prior. We have personally been in direct contact with many of them and implemented many changes over several months as a result of their input.

Flippa has been live for a couple of days now and so far we haven’t seen any drop off in listings whatsoever. We’ve also had many compliments from buyers saying that life is so much easier for them on Flippa. That said, we will continue to make improvements based on real customer feedback as we always do.

Found via Darren, Twitter third-party application TwitterMass has gone up for auction on Sitepoint. Readwriteweb has an initial review of the service. Basically what TwitterMass does is take your search queries and follow anyone who mentions the term in your query. For example, if I setup the queries for ”hotels in Paris” or “centernetworks”, TwitterMass will automatically follow you if you mention those terms in a tweeter message. You can select to unfollow the newly followed if they don’t return the follow in x days.

There’s a free version and a $100 version which apparently comes with bonus features like the ability to DM oprah (ok i made that up) – but there is a $100 “personal version”. TwitterMass founder Jonathan Nelson notes that since the launch of the paid version 3 days ago, they have already sold 8 units. Nelson noted in a recent interview that TwitterMass took 2 weeks to develop. The service was built using Ruby and uses oAuth to pull in the account holder’s information.

The current bid price is $13,000 and the auction notes that if the price reaches over $100,000 they will throw in their ad network as a bonus.

As a reminder, Twitter is building paid tools – something to consider if you are planning to buy/acquire a Twitter application.

Earlier this year, electronics retailer Circuit City filed for bankruptcy and eventually closed up shop in March. Today the company has announced they have hired Streambank to handle the sale of the leftover intellectual property.

The sale will include the domain circuitcity.com, the Firedog brand name along with a variety of other assets. If you are interested, there’s an auction on May 11th at the offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, LLP, 4 Times Square, New York. It looks like your bids must be received by May 6th.

There are other URLs for sale along with a variety of trademarks. Oh, and you will love this…their customer databases are also for sale. 

CircuitCity opened in 1949 and had over 500 stores at the time of the bankruptcy.

What’s the circuitcity.com domain worth? Leave your thoughts in the comments…

eBay has announced the launch of eBay Motors Local Classifieds for individual sellers today.  The idea of this program is to bring together local buyers and sellers within a 100 mile zone of their local market.

Sellers can list up to six vehicles for a seven day period with no insertion or successful listing fees through July 15.

Considering the launch is for individual sellers, wouldn’t most transactions be local anyway? eBay is pushing the idea that you can go kick the tires and really investigate the car in-person via only online.

We reviewed the financial news and stock quote aggregator Streetread back in August when they launched their mobile version. The company describes the service as, "Streetread automatically aggregates the latest headlines from over 20 of the leading finance sites on the web, as well as all of the stocks you choose to follow".

Yesterday Streetread went up for auction on Sitepoint. The minimum bid is $8,500 with a buy-it-now price of $10,000. The founder says they are selling due to a new project the team is working on. They claim 2,000 registered users. And they note 7,000 unique visitors a month.

Last month we reported on the startups that came out of the StartupCamp in Australia. Today I’ve learned that the six startups are now being auctions individually on the Sitepoint Marketplace. I am unsure if this was the plan from the beginning or if the developers just decided to pick up a small bit of cash quickly.

Here are the startups with links to their auctions (amounts in US$):

• ActivityHorizon – current bid $1,800
• EpicTweet – current bid $600
• MyPetsNeedLove – current bid $555
• GiveDo – current bid $1,600
• ThreeFeeds – current bid $500
• iTrafficApp – current bid $1,550

Yesterday we reported on the auction of the HeyAmigo email service. The auction just closed with no buyer and no bids. Ryan Carson of Carsonified, makers of HeyAmigo, noted on Twitter, "38 people watching the auction and email questions are starting to come through. Will it kick off in the end? Nervous."

The starting bid was set at $25,000. I think this was a reasonable price for a pre-made, ready-to-launch email service. It will be interesting to see what becomes of the service now… start the auction at a lower price or sell privately to those who asked questions about the auction.