Sedo Reminder Email is a Bit Confusing

About a week ago, I placed a $1,750 bid on a domain name via Sedo, and the owner sent a counter offer. The name had been listed for a BIN price of my offer, and was changed just prior to my bid, so I wasn’t interested in paying more, and I didn’t bother to check the counter offer.

Yesterday, I received an email from Sedo that was confusing to me. The email read:

Dear Elliot Silver,

We write to remind you of the offer of 23000 $US that was recently submitted for domain [redacted].

Please login to your Sedo account to negotiate or complete the sale.
Please don’t delay; offers are only binding for seven days.”

When I first read the email, I thought it was a phishing attempt because it didn’t read very well. I know Sedo is based in Germany, but when targeting the US market, the company should consider having one of its US-based staff pen the email. It might seem silly, but $US is not commonly written, so that also threw me off.

In addition to the grammar issues, the email was a bit confusing to me, possibly because I didn’t know about the $23,000 counter offer. In my opinion, it would have been more clear if the email mentioned it was a counter offer.

My suggestion would be to send this: “We write to remind you of the counter offer of $xx,xxx that was recently submitted for [domain name].”

I appreciate the fact that Sedo has added the amount to the email, but I think the wording needs to be changed.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

11 COMMENTS

  1. @Elliot that’s said to hear…
    My deals with Sedo has been fine so, far..
    I think you or Sedo had mistaken with €
    You might have made offer of €1750 instead of $1750 or Sedo thought that you had made offer in € and then they send you price in $$$$$.
    What ever it might be it sounds like lost in translation 😉
    Wish you all the best 🙂

  2. Hi Elliot,

    We recently launched this small improvement to our notification emails to domain sellers when they receive an offer or counter-offer on a domain name. These updates mean that sellers see the amount of the offer directly in the email. This was added at the request of many of our sellers, in an effort to make it easier to review and respond to bids.

    We will review the language in these emails to ensure that it is as clear and accurate as possible.

    Thanks for your feedback – it is always appreciated.

    Daniel @ Sedo

    • Daniel, I hope that you fix that disaster of a service, SedoMLS, as it applies to GoDaddy/TDNAM. Lowball offers, no communication etc. for 20%? No, thanks.

  3. Elliot,

    Let me tell you a story…

    Back before everything was computerized trading floors that had offices in different countries would have to go through any discrepancies in figures between the two locations by hand.

    When there was a difference of opinion on what the final figure should be between two offices, US/Germany UK/Germany Japan/Germany, The Germans were never wrong.

    Germans do not make mistakes. I bet you the click through rate is far higher on the email they are current using than if they switched to ‘the counter offer’ your annoyance notwithstanding.

  4. “Germans do not make mistakes. I bet you the click through rate is far higher on the email they are current using than if they switched to ‘the counter offer’ your annoyance notwithstanding.”

    Don’t make mistakes ?Ever heard of WWII . . .
    Anyway, Sedo has always had horrible design, horrible email copy. It’s doubtful they’ve tested any of it before roll-out. Look at the home page alone. It’s a case study in bad execution.

  5. Sedo’s ‘offer’ system has always seemed to be designed to prevent the seller identifying the buyer, whilst the buyer of course, knows all about the seller.

    Presumably this is to ensure the seller can’t bypass Sedo’s control.

    However, without any information from Sedo about the bona fides of the ‘buyer’, this crazy setup was/is also a recipe for a UDRP entrapment.

    Previously, you had to agree to negotiate before they would let you see the offer.

    Many times, I just let the unknown ‘offer’ pass rather than being forced into an agreement I was not happy with.

    If the ‘buyer’ was genuine and significant, they would come back another way, sans Sedo.

    Daniel, even with the update(s), your system still needs a total rethink.

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