The Problems with Bido

Well, Sahar, you asked for it :) - over on the Conceptualist.com. Before I start though, I really do appreciate Bido, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people behind it and I am thankful that they are so willing to listen to criticism to create a better product. Okay, here it goes:

• Copyrights - or rather, the lack of concern there of by all parties. It degrades the experience when I see Bido pushing clear trademark violations - often times many per day! There should be a report abuse button or something in the voting because there are some really obvious issues (and some obvious typos too), that should be visible to anyone who would unknowingly bid on the name.


• Garbage in/Garbage out - there needs to be tighter limits on how many names you can submit and the number of domains at auction per day. The broader they expand these, the worse the quality gets, the hard it is to stand out and the lower the average sales price is going to be. The only person that benefits are buyers, and with so many auctions and so few buyers, you end up getting buyers fatigue.


• Not enough rewards in place for comments and votes - there are lots of ideas here, and you want to promote helpful comments and accurate votes so maybe base it on the final sales price of the name as a sort of weighted scale (if you vote for a name that doesn't sell at all for example, you get no reward from that vote). There are lots of possible rewards too, from increased weight on your votes if you are a good voter or acceleration credits, to more subtle benefits such as a more fairly ordered list of "experts" based on the quality feedback received for comments.


• The transition from one domain a day has been rough - yes, there are benefits to going to multiple auctions but you've lost of lot of followers in the process. Things that still suffer include: lack of chat (too spread out and having to switch rooms constantly wasn't fun), lack of comments (it's hard to find comments for one thing as there are so many auctions), lack of quality and lack of focus.
  


• I want more flexibility on reserve prices without having such stringent penalties in place. I'm the one who suffers if it doesn't sell. That's penalty enough I think. A fixed price for sending a domain to auction with a reserve or higher percentage charge for sales completed with a reserve are fine solutions, but the sliding scale thing is scary and I won't do it until it's less severe.


• Affiliates - there's absolutely no benefit to me to promote your auctions, and therefore I'll promote other marketplaces where I have the potential to earn a reward for helping you market your domains.


• Direct link to vote for submitted domains. I should be able to say "hey, this is a cool domain, vote on it", even if it's not my own domain. Right now that process is really difficult to do and so people resort to more backdoor means to get votes. Of course, if you limit the number of submissions, this wouldn't be as big of a deal, but it's so easy to get lost in the mix. Have you I mentioned you should limit submissions A LOT!?


• Prioritized/featured domains for the day: Either include a voting mechanism, a paid for service or hand pick them but we need a way to promote the domains that are likely to do well but that get lost in the shuffle. The promotion should be significant, not just a star beside the name, but serious "these are the names of the day" kind of deal right there at the top of the front page.


• There have been significant improvements to the communication and transfer of domains in the new peer to peer style, but it's crazy waiting weeks to get payment AFTER you've already pushed the name just because the buyer hasn't clicked that they've accepted it. I don't know if that means that peer to peer will never work, but it's really quite frustrating right now.

That's it. I hope this list helps. I focused on the negative because that's what you were looking for but I do like the platform and I do want to see it succeed. It just has a ways to go!