In the domain name game, you will find the most sneaky people around. Domainers do make for great PI’s, but it amazes me how many great lengths people go threw to hide who they are!

Domainer type sites are also mainly Nontransparent. NameJet.com listened to it’s customers and provided more transparancy and now the other leading auction house has followed. SnapNames.com has provided a new column to their auction listing page called "Bidders". The new column provides how many people have back ordered the specific domain name.

I like it in one way, I hate it in another. I work very hard to find "good deals" and do tons of research on domain names that are coming up for auction. Many times, I am the only bidder and win the domain for the min cost. Is it a bad domain, because there are no other bidders? No, I just worked harder then the rest and found a domain that others didn’t. With the new feature on SnapNames, this will take this advantage away, because now showing how many bidders is like putting a big red flag on each domain with a bidder in it!

NameJet.com had already done this, so if you didn’t want to put up the red flag by placing the bid, you have to wait for the very last second to put in your bid. So, now I will have to do this twice, if I want to find any gems and get them for the min back order price.

The good part about this, is now you can find and back order other domains that you might have missed! It is also interesting to see "how many" people have a certain domain back ordered. You can click the column and Ascend or descend and discover the highest or lowest bidders for each domain. I did a quick search for 3 character domains with no hyphens or numbers and discovered the highest amount of bidders in one auction was 119, for the domain name hja.net, which is listed for $79.

It is also interesting and helpful because SnapNames allows User Submitted domain names. The users that submit, select the price they want to start the auction at. They do not allow reserve prices, so your starting bid is your price. Many listers would take a huge risk and just list their domain in the price ranges of "normal" dropping domains. Depending on the partner registrar, is what set’s the basic price for the expired domain auction. The main prices are $99, $79 and $59.

I always wondered if people were back ordering user submitted domains that were priced higher. For example, I see several 3 letter .net domains listed for $1,080 usd. I personally never back ordered any of these, because I do not consider them a "deal". Well, I was wrong, because nearly every single one, has at least one bidder in them. So this feature will help out sellers and setting their prices on certain type of domains as well, so they get bidders.

Several .org domains are listed for $499 and nearly all have back orders which is Very interesting to me, because I have a hard time getting an offer of $350 on a Great domain, let alone some random combo of crappy. So I guess I found a new place to list certain domains. As soon as SnapNames allows "Moniker" domains to be listed, instead of having to transfer your domain to the registrar udomainname.com.