Another Quick Blog Sale Example At Sitepoint
As it’s the holidays (well, in the US, anyway)- I’ll keep this one short. It wasn’t on my intended list of three samples! And it’s mainly for the benefit and ongoing discourse with Matt Mickiewicz of Sitepoint and anyone else out there who is reading this, and likes to trade on sitepoint. Last week there was a site for sale here. It was EFXscripts.com. We wanted it because we like the scripts that it sells and wanted to merge it with a site of our own which has some great, unique scripts, but hasn’t been performing well-: GorillaScripts.com. Plus it was a PR6 with seemingly natural backlinks, so cheap at the price.
Now for one reason or other, we were late to the bidding and somebody else bid at the BIN price. That was $750. Rather annoyed with myself, I messaged the seller and told him that I was sorry to have missed the bidding and that if for any reason the other bid fell through, I was willing to pay $1,000. So $250 over the BIN price. The seller responds to my message and says that I’m not too late as he hasn’t accepted the BIN from the other bidder. So the site was mine if I wanted it.
To my mind, this was unethical behavior on behalf of the seller. I was really in two minds as to how to proceed. The other bidder had won fair and square. My message was in the spirit of “if the other bidder doesn’t pay up…” In this case, I was saved as I got a secondary message from the seller saying that the original BIN bidder had upped his bid to $1,050 – outbidding me. So I was able to gracefully exit.
This example, Matt, is intended to show you how your policies, in bending over backwards for the seller- have created a “black market” of behind-the-scenes bidding. It was the seller’s choice to create a BIN price- he/she didn’t need to. And if it was too low, tough luck. Plus this sort of sale will make future “valuations” practically impossible for buyers, as unlike in the past- one can’t really gauge the “going rate” for a particular type of site.
I do have some suggestions. Here’s the first-: sellers should be forced to sell to the buyer who does a BIN on their auction- if the buyer meets certain criteria (prompt payment, etc).
[tags]sitepoint,scripts,BIN,PR6,blog sales,ethics[/tags]
Maybe you should just stop buying at sitepoint and move to ebay. Seems better for your nerves.
People have always done this kind of things at sitepoint. And they will continue. Maybe in the past you have been lucky and never had to deal with such a sale, but they always existed.
franky said this on November 24, 2006 11:43 pm
Ah! Cheers, Franky. I’ll leave my dealings with eBay for another time!
Mosey said this on November 25, 2006 2:25 pm
I would also sell to the higest bider no mather where he comes from. Until I have money in my pockets I will accept higher bids from everyone.
Miha said this on November 28, 2006 4:03 pm