My first domain sale or how I sold twice to the same company

This is the story of my first domain sale – DiabetesGuard dot com. This is my highest selling price to date. I am going to share with you the details and how I achieved that.

The Acquisition

Few years ago when I was getting into domain name investing I purchased several domains. Of course as every beginner most of my domains were .info, .org, .net and only few .com. I was checking GD expiry domains once or twice every week. I didn’t have much cash to invest so most of them I hand registered and some of them I got from GoDaddy Closeouts. One of the domains was DiabetesGuard dot com which I purchased from GD Closeouts for $20.57 total price.

After I got around 50 domains I listed all of them in several marketplaces, GD Premium Listings, Sedo and Afternic.

The Sale

Few months after I listed my domains in the marketplaces, I got initial offer of $500 for my GD Closeout purchase – DiabetesGuard dot com via Sedo.com. I was excited and I was thinking to accept the offer, but later I decided to counter with $1500. Probably I was able to counter with more than $1500, but I was too excited and I didn’t want to lost the sale. Later I received another counter offer from the buyer for $700.  I countered $1300, with back and forth the buyer accepted the $1000 offer. Here is the full log from Sedo:

Buyer’s Offer: 500 USD
Your Counter Offer: 1,500 USD
Buyer’s Offer: 700 USD
Your Counter Offer: 1,300 USD
Buyer’s Offer: 800 USD
Your Counter Offer: 1,100 USD
Buyer’s Offer: 850 USD
Your Counter Offer: 1,000 USD
Buyer confirmed: 1,000 USD

I was happy with the sale. Only for a few months my profit for this domain name was $829.43, after the commissions.

Post Sale

After I transferred the domain name to them and I received the payment. I did some research who was the buyer and I found it was a big company in Norway. I was a bit disappointed that I could get more for this domain name, but I moved forward investing my profit and acquired more domains.

Later I found somewhere in the domain forums I think, that it is good practice to add to backorder your successfully sold domain names. I went and I added my recent sale to SnapNames. After that I sold few more domains and I was focused mainly on my day job working as a web developer.

Two years later I received an email notification from SnapNames that I have successfully acquired a domain name. I was surprised and I didn’t know which was the domain name, since I wasn’t added any domains recently. I opened my SnapNames account and I saw that I successfully acquired DiabetesGuard dot com, the same domain that I sold few years ago. This time I paid $69 for it.

Sold again

After the acquisition I parked the domain name to Bodis and month or so I was contacted via email from a person that was interested to purchase the domain name from me. I did some research and I found that it was a person from the same company in Norway, that I sold the domain few years ago. This was telling me three things:

1. They forgot to renew the domain
2. They want the domain back very badly
3. No one knows I was the seller first time, because Sedo keeps this confidential.

Because of those three reasons I was able to passively negotiate this time. I replied the domain isn’t for sale, then they replied with initial offer of $500. I said no I won’t sell. Then they send me two or three more emails which I didn’t reply on them. After a week or maybe more they send me an email with offer of $1000 and saying this is all they can paid for the domain name, because they are a startup company and can’t afford more. I replied to this email with counter offer of $1500, then they replied back and saying $1000 is their offer and can’t go above that.

I sent them email in which I said: “Look $1500 is the price of the domain and I won’t sell lower”. Few days after that they send me an email that they will accept the offer. We closed the transaction via escrow.com and the buyer paid the fees.

This is the story of my first domain sale that I sold twice to the same company.

The bottom line

Investment: $89.57 ($20.57 GD Closeout + $69 Backorder)
Revenue: $2500.00
Total taxes and fees: $198.00
Profit: $2212.43

The same company still owns the domain name and I still have it on backorder 🙂

Do you have a similar story? … please share in the comments below.