A matter of trust

[Kay]

Obviously you don't want to trust a complete stranger with your life savings (or even a lot of your cash) but when you're dealing at the low end of the market then IMO it's not worth spending time doing any due diligence.

I have a quick look to see where the domain is currently (often parked at Sedo or similar) and look at the who.is, and that's about it. If the person is a stranger to me, I take account of their standing and rep on whatever forum I found them on. I've never yet been disappointed or cheated in any domain deal. The worst thing that's ever happened was that one deal took ages to go through but all the delay was because of escrow. It wasn't the buyer's fault.

How about you? Do you tend to trust people you don't know or not? What figure would make you want to use escrow?

One funny thing that happened to me was that I'd bought a cheapo domain from a guy I didn't know (met him on a forum) and when he did the push, he accidentally pushed his entire portfolio to me. I couldn't figure it out at first. Anyway, I took the one I'd paid for and emailed to tell him what had happened. Boy, I could hear his heart beating from thousands of miles away. LOL! Of course I gave all the domains back to him, but I bet he'll never make that mistake again. Has anyone else got any strange or funny domaining stories to tell?

[Fish]

I haven't used escrow at all. Domaining is a small world, and I generally know who I'm selling to. And if it's under $1000, I'll take the risk unless I feel uncomfortable for some reason. Over $1000, if I don't know who the person is, I'd want escrow. Over 10K, and I'd want escrow unless I really trust the person's rep.

The only oddities are when I've sold domains, gotten paid, and the buyer has never taken the minor step of accepting the domain (despite repeated emails to do so). I have a few of those I'm keeping for 5 years or so. Then, I figure they're mine again.

[bwelford]

I think it's wise to follow a two part process: get a comfortable feeling about the people chemistry side of trust and then have a mechanism that you're both happy with for the exchange of properties and cash. As Robert Frost said, "Good fences make good neighbors."

On the people chemistry aspect, I believe a high percentage of people are worth trusting. So it's just a question of doing enough communication (e-mail, chats, telephone conversations via Skype, etc.) to be able to sense if something seems questionable. In that case, it may be worth cutting off that person rather than trying to make the fence 'fool-proof'.

As far as the 'fence' goes, again I believe a reasonable approach is to have a two-part payment. Given the amounts of trust each side must accept, a first payment of 70% of the total before any transfers of properties are made has worked for me. The buyer then sends the remaining 30% when fully satisfied that all has been delivered satisfactorily but within a reasonable delay, given whatever support the seller may need to give the buyer to get things working. Provided both parties are trust-worthy people, then this works out well.

[Kay]

I've only ever used escrow once. A guy I didn't know contacted me out of the blue and offered $2K for a domain I owned and said he would pay via escrow. I said OK, and the deal was done.

Mostly I'm buying and selling at such a low level and/or with people I know and trust, so escrow isn't necessary.

Fish, I agree that domaining is a small world, forum activity is also. It's not hard to find out who a person is and what their rep is in the online world.

Barry, I think you must be talking about larger amounts of money. I'd not bother with that kind of thing for a couple of hundred bucks. I just tend to assume that the person will deliver as promised. That said, there are plenty of things that would make alarm bells go off and I wouldn't even want to do business with that kind of person at all.

What would make your alarm bells go off?

[grynge]

On DP I think I was a magnet for scammers, though I never got taken by one. The worst was a sale believe it or not for $50.00 it took about 6 weeks to finish and the guy still hasn't moved the site from my server. (reminds me I should charge him hosting)

Most of the stuff I have transferred at the same time as they have sent the money. With some larger sites it was a bit easier as I was in face to face talks with the people buying so it was just a matter of saying once the cheques cashed the transfers would be on the way.

I think if you do you due diligence on the buyer you should be ok upto a point. It is probably my way of thinking about everything. If you can't afford to lose it make sure you protect it with all you can.

With regards to the scammers on DP they all had one thing in common...... offering to good a deal. I was after a domain which had to have a certain keyword in it, so some guy offered a domain which had like pr6 and low alexa/compete, it also had a running site on it. I looked at the site and probably would have paid $xx,xxx for it alone and all the scammer wanted was $300.00 Other scammers tried to say stuff like how do I know you won't scam me I want you to open a dispute with paypal and then cancel it, then I know you won't be able to cancel on me. Or when pressed for better deals they cave easily rather than miss out, a $x,xxx LLL domain I was able to get down to $xx or they haven't been able to do my test for ownership.

The ones worse than scammers I think have been the non payers, they bid your auction up and then don't payup those guys really annoy me.

[Kay]

I agree. People should do what they say they'll do. I bought a couple of domains yesterday, but there was a big time difference between the seller and me, so there was a bit of time-lag on the communications. Everything went well. Very friendly seller - he recognised that the Internet is global and not everyone is in the same country.

There's instant gratification and all that but sometimes you might have to wait a few hours for someone to get out of bed if they're on the other side of the world from you. But when you're talking about waiting time, I'm expecting hours not days.

The worst was a sale believe it or not for $50.00 it took about 6 weeks to finish and the guy still hasn't moved the site from my server. (reminds me I should charge him hosting)

LOL! The cheapos are often the worst. But usually they're also the smaller sites (if you have a site on them in the first place). We have a VPS so it doesn't matter to us if they're still using our server for a while. If it's a newbie, it's a lot for them to do all at once without having to change hosting at the same time. If it's not a newbie, then they might need a kick up the bum sometimes. Can't say it's ever been a problem for me.