Interested to hear what you and others think is a good extension time, currently its an hour which can be a fairly long time when multiple people are bidding at the end of an auction.
Would it be a big deal if sellers got to set their own extension times?
It may depend on the domain (ie bigger ticket domains - ie $25,000+ might need to be longer), but my gut says that shorter is better (ie 1 minute max - but I reckon this would definitely be something to split test - I wouldn't be surprised if something more like 15 seconds was most effective).
For me I think there is far less due diligence required on a domain than there is on a website and they tend to sell for less (because they have no revenues) so I'm not so sure that long extension periods are necessary.
My thinking is that if you want to extract an extra bid out of someone you don't want them to think "rationally" you want them to bid while they are "in the moment" and in the midst of a bidding war.
So I suspect that the more "rushed" a bidder feels the more likely they are to let the "fear of missing out" or "being beaten by a competitor" drive them to bid again. Given enough time bidders might opt to act more rationally and step back from the auction.
And I think the more bids someone makes the more committed they will become to winning the auction yet I don't think people are going to wait for an hour to engage in an emotional bidding war.
I'm no expert in the psychology of maximising auction results, but I would think that you want auctions to end with a flurry of bids. I feel like watching auctions should almost be entertainment in itself...
I see domain auctions being no different to property auctions, often you'll have 40 people turn up to the auction but only 4 or 5 people are really there to bid the rest are just watching, but the 35 that didn't bid are probably still going to be talking about it with their friends at the dinner party that night (which is good word of mouth marketing).
...but how many of those non-bidders would you expect to hang around to the end of the property auction if there was an hour between bids.
Back in the old NetFleet auction days (it's now a blind tender) I'd go to the site every day at 1pm (when the auctions finished) even when I wasn't bidding for no other reason than I enjoyed watching the flurry of bids for the big ticket domains that were up for sale and I just wanted to know what was happening in the industry.
I feel like Flippa should be trying to create a similar environment where people can visit the site at certain times every day and know that there is almost certainly going to be some fireworks. I'm not saying you should "force" people to set the auction times to conclude at the exact same time everyday, but I think it should be "encouraged" to conclude them at certain times and maybe even on certain days because that's when most people would be on the site.
Ie if it was understood that 95% of domain auctions finished at either:
8AM Tuesday, 2pm Wednesday or 8pm Thursday and the industry came to expect that there would be at least 50 - 100 "no reserve" or "reserve met" domains concluding at these times each week (and each bid only extended the auction by 1 minute) I think I'd make it part of my daily/weekly ritual to jump on Flippa at those times.
At the moment auction finishing times are quite random which makes it hard for a domainer to lock Flippa into their weekly schedule.
