Godaddyrefund.me

Godaddy's Landrush Screw Up

So I woke up at 7:30AM to start bidding @ 8AM on .ME domains like everyone else did when the public domain land rush opened last week.

You can imagine I had a list of verbs, unusual urls and cool .me ending words and hoped for the 1000x returns that I wanted to make on the URLS.

So this is what happened:

8AM - I'm ready to start buying. The website is acting real slooooooowwwww.

It takes 45 mins of cart loading time to get my first batch through!!!! It was so slow it was unbelievable. During this time URLs were going in and out of 'unavailable' status as if godaddy had no idea as to what was going on.

8:45AM woah my first batch had gone through of premium URLs. Confirmations come through. Money removed from my bank account.

8:55 AM I got another batch through and confirmations come through to my email.

I continue to do this until around 10AM and I had topped my budget.

Later that day I get emails coming through saying that the URLs had been taken. All URLs had been rejected. How sad. Luckily I had pooled resources with a friend and we managed to get 1 premium together as a team.

So techcrunch then do their post on the matter and godaddy sent out an email saying we're all going to get a refund within 24 - 48 hours plus 5 - 7 days bank processing time. Jokers.

So now some of the refunds have come through. Luckily for me I made some money off the currency move in the mean time between spend in UKP to USD and refund in USD to UKP - it was minimal though.

Godaddy's Prebid Screw Up

So I bid on some domains to get into the private bidding process earlier this year. A similar experience was faced but everyone kept quiet to reduce the competition for domains at the time. Godaddy had also gone through the same process of taking our money then having to refund us later. However, some sources believe that godaddy employees had been hot picking off the best URLs for themselves. All the evidence pointed to this.

More interestingly they also issued login IDs for each individual URL auction. So we had tons of Usernames to use. We had to reset the passwords then change our passwords in a 'ballsed up' long winded process. They then, due to complains, sent out a new process where by our bids were consolidated into one login ID. If only they were using clickpass.

Godaddy Bid Mechanics

Unfortunately, because my bids are coming up soon I can't explain how the mechanics of the bidding work fully. From the way the system is setup though. I can tell various pieces of useful information about the bid (e.g. predicted end price, best time to bid, bid strategy, max bid price I should bid, predicted number of bids). It's going to be exciting knowing this information. I am basically hoping to arbitrage between the privateness of the private godaddy auction (imperfect market) (e.g. imperfect buying) vs. the open market of sedo (near perfect market). So thats the theory. If you want to supply capital and be part of this - email me. I'll tell you how it goes later....in the mean time I'm going to relax.me