SnapNames.com has added a "Make an Offer" style listing to it’s line up for private sellers listing domain names on SnapNames. I haven’t been using SnapNames much as a buyer or seller but I happened to visit the site today and noticed the new feature. It appears the new style was added in about December of 2009.

Currently at writing there are 72,197 domain names listed with the Make an Offer feature.

Make an Offer is very common in the domain name industry as it is hard to price one of a kind items like domain names. It can be frustrating for both buyer and sellers using Make an Offer but there are things in place to help save time. The seller can set a minimum offer amount which does cut down on the low ball type offers but many people do not like setting a minimum offer amount because it can prevent an interested party from sending an offer at all.

Since a seller really doesn’t know what kind of offer an interested party is going to make, they do not want to cut things short or give any false impressions. The down side of allowing just about any amount of an offer coming in, is you as a seller can’t get mad when a low ball comes in. You are allowing it to happen not putting in a minimum bid amount.

Many domains listed with the Make an Offer have $1 minimum bid amounts, but clearly the seller isn’t going to accept at that amount and you are likely to get a High counter offer.

An example would be for the currently listed domain TouchScreen.com . Minimum bid amount is $1 and the domain received 7 bids currently since being listed Dec 2, 2009. Since I am not the seller, I can not see what the bid amounts were, but they were likely pretty low.

A couple downsides to how SnapNames displays the Make an Offer style domains…. you as a buyer can not see the Minimum offer amount, unless you click the domain name and are brought to the specific listing page for the domain. At that point you are able to see the minimum offer amount. SnapNames does have a section for "Minimum Bid" but doesn’t show the minimum offer amount in that section.

Another thing from what I can tell, the seller doesn’t have the options to send the domain to auction based on an offer received. Currently a seller can Accept, Decline or Counter. It would be nice if the seller had the option to send it to auction on an offer like you can at Sedo and Afternic.

SnapNames charges a 20% sellers fee. Domain names being listed on SnapNames must be with a registrar of SnapNames (mainly Moniker but some sister type registrars as well), because the transfer of the domain name is instant after payment clears. The instant transfer is really nice for both buyers and sellers IMO! You can submit your domains for auction directly in your Moniker.com account.

Here is a link directly from SnapNames about the Make Offer feature. Since the Make an Offer feature is now available on SnapNames, it is very likely the inventory will grow a lot and become similar to Sedo’s inventory. SnapNames does not have a fee to list domains, only when it sells.

I don’t mind the new feature, but I think the seller needs the option to send the domain to auction based on an offer. If the domain is sent to auction and nobody else bids, the auction is sold to the person who sent the offer.