Discuss WHC's Backordering Platform (3.Viewing)

FM said:

This is correct, Rob. I should add that the goal is to retire the Sibername order part at one point, in order to be complete.

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Sounds good. I assumed that would be the goal, I just didn't want to be the guinea pig

However, based on the TBR quality, its probably not much of a risk to test it out right now, lol!

domains said:

I like the domain name search feature, automatically loads results, will save people some time.

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Yes, the search is very nice, but again, I am not a fan of displaying all our Siber/WHC bids and prices for every Tom, Dick & Harry to see, and then potentially use a data point for their own orders.

Very slick platform, very user-friendly for Joe Public, the most user-friendly .CA dropcatch service I have ever seen.

Congrats Frank.

I am looking forward to taking it for a test drive this week. Are the "hot" domains manually flagged by WHC staff or are those domains that other customers have already bid on? I can see some domainers hating that if the latter is the case.

I wish the search had a "clear" or "reset" button/feature.

Good luck with the new platform!

DomainRecap said:

I am not a fan of displaying all our Siber/WHC bids and prices for every Tom, Dick & Harry to see, and then potentially use a data point for their own orders.

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Noted. Would you believe some domain investors actually liked this? ;-) They shall remain unnamed.

MaiTaiMan said:

I am looking forward to taking it for a test drive this week. Are the "hot" domains manually flagged by WHC staff or are those domains that other customers have already bid on? I can see some domainers hating that if the latter is the case.

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Thank you for the kind words. The hot flags are added manually by WHC staff, but as you see domainers already hate that you can sort by starting bid.

MaiTaiMan said:

I wish the search had a "clear" or "reset" button/feature.

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Noted, thank you for the suggestion, makes sense especially if you have filled out multiple of the fields. I always thought no one used the search ;-)

FM said:

Noted. Would you believe some domain investors actually liked this?

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Of course the lazy ones who stumble out of bed at 1:30PM every Wednesday would love it, but I doubt the deep-divers who provide this important data are all that appreciative.

DomainRecap said:

Of course the lazy ones who stumble out of bed at 1:30PM every Wednesday would love it, but I doubt the deep-divers who provide this important data are all that appreciative.

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I agree, I hate it too. However, Sibername has already always done this anyways, so its not any different - other than the "hot" flags set by staff. And lets face it, the staff aren't always going to be very good with their picks. I see some of CIRA's picks and have to chuckle some times.

And I suspect that WHC will quickly realize they don't really need to publish their hot picks because that just means its work on their end. And they're not going to be very good at it unless someone spends a decent amount of time doing their research like we do. And considering our bids quickly overwhelm the hot-picks anyways, I don't think they'll put too much effort into it long term. If they do, I suspect it'll just be some automated flagging of their hot picks.

But guys who work hard to research of course are going to hate that it's made easy for the lazy. That motivates the researchers to not put their bids in until the last second to avoid giving away their hard work for free.

However, as a registrar, I get that they want to encourage _everyone_ to know about _every_ decent domain and get as many people involved in the auctions as possible. I mean it would be silly from their perspective not to.

So I'm definitely torn on this one. You can look at it two ways:

1. You're being bent over and screwed when they take your hard work and research and they publish it free to the public.

2. Its a public auction, so the pre-auction is no different than the post-auction. Bids are made public, simple as that.

So this argument has very valid perspectives from both sides.

In the end, as a bidder, there's two choices to combat that problem.

1. only place bids at the last second.
2. quit bidding with them.

As hardcore researchers, I don't think we're ever going to win this one. If I'm concerned about grabbing something under the radar, I have to go with option 1.

rlm said:

I agree, I hate it too. However, Sibername has already always done this anyways, so its not any different - other than the "hot" flags set by staff.

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Really? I must have missed that list - can you post a link as I never knew something like that existed in the same form on Siber. I'm looking though the site and I can't find anything.

DomainRecap said:

Really? I must have missed that list - can you post a link as I never knew something like that existed in the same form on Siber. I'm looking though the site and I can't find anything.

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When you bid on sibername, it shows you the next highest bid price to get into the auction. You always have to bid higher than the last bid. You must always bid really early??? If you bid late, you'll see the prices aren't $20.

So the domain that is marked as a "Hot" domain for next week, seems to be not having any bids yet. Now let the party begin.

rlm said:

When you bid on sibername, it shows you the next highest bid price to get into the auction. You always have to bid higher than the last bid. You must always bid really early??? If you bid late, you'll see the prices aren't $20.

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Okay... but have you seen what WHC is doing? My issue isn't with pricing on individual domains, it's with the ease of displaying, filtering and extracting mass order data directly on the WHC order page. Our order data that we input.

On WHC there is a full list of all TBR domains, each with the current bid price on them (from WHC/Siber orders) that is fully sortable by Bid Price. You can even add filters like Character Length, Keywords, Prefix/Suffix, and Alpha.

It would take me less than 1 second to get the "Top 50 Domains By Bid Price" out of WHC, while it might take me days and days (weeks?) of manually entering thousands of domains into Siber and then writing down the current price, which of course could also change a second later.

On Siber there is absolutely no possible way to create the same up-to-date "WHC Top 50 List" list, in anywhere near a reasonable amount of time.

On WHC it's a cake walk to extract multiple data points in seconds, including sorting by Current Bid Price and also Bid Price by other factors like Domain Length, Keywords, Alpha. etc.


So if a domain investor rolls out of bed at 1:30PM, he can do a LOT more damage with the full & sortable order data on the WHC page (i.e. by creating a potential order list) as compared to how far that same investor could ever get on Siber.

For example, although the TBR week just started, here is the current list of domains with active orders on WHC + Siber, including bid prices. It took less than a second for WHC to generate this:





How long do you think it would take you to retrieve, collate and display the exact same data from Siber with 3K expired domains? A couple of hours? But while you were doing it, 5 more people put in orders and 3 placed higher bids. Get back to work... Ooops, we just got 3 more orders and 2 more outbids, start over!

On WHC, you just refresh the page.

This is my point exactly.

DomainRecap said:

Okay... but have you seen what WHC is doing? My issue isn't with pricing on individual domains, it's with the ease of displaying, filtering and extracting mass order data directly on the WHC order page. Our order data that we input.

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Ah yes, you are right, I get what you're saying, duh. Yeah, you're not crazy, its me. I'm just so used to doing on own procedure and pasting in my list and seeing all the pre-existing bids that I forgot that you can't seem them until you bid on them yourself. So yeah, you're right, that is kinda B.S. But my conclusion isn't any different. What's good for you isn't good for WHC and I highly doubt they're going to take that part away. You're gonna have to just lube up and take it, especially when they know you don't have much choice. If it were my registrar, I can't say that I'd do it any differently either.

And I guess I'll just fess up - part of my "procedure" was to automate extracting all the bids out of Sibername. It doesn't take as long as you think it does, especially when its automated. But I do my own research first, then I check the bids on sibername at the last few minutes just to see if there's anything I overlooked, which was rare anyways.

Can you put in a max bid that is not visible?

Ie current bid is 1k and I offer 1.2 but put in a max bid of 3?

I have not had time lately to check it out in any detail and intend to sit down with it this weekend.

rlm said:

And I guess I'll just fess up - part of my "procedure" was to automate extracting all the bids out of Sibername. It doesn't take as long as you think it does, especially when its automated

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I don't think you were the only one either, and when it started to become overtly obvious, I began to see people (like Mr 401/North) starting to bid really, really late to hamper this tactic. Then everyone started bidding at the last second and near-crashing Siber.

WHC is going make this last-second bidding trend even worse IMO.

I'm playing with this bit I am not interested in domains with numbers and dashes.

Kinda aggravating that I can't filter those out.

I would like to make one small request:

Before closing Siber and moving everything TBR over to WHC, could we please have a standard TBR Order System like everyone else? Having to go through the full purchase process (even if we don't get charged immediately) with Credit Card, CVC, Registrant, etc. is way too convoluted and time-consuming.

It's obviously a kludge to get TBR onto WHC, but hopefully this is just a temp solution, and not something that's going to be permanent when the switchover occurs.

And this switchover is bothering me so much that I have started ordering TBR domains at MyID. Digest that for a second.

Siber was the near-perfect model for TBR, with seamless TBR ordering and payments, and forgive me if I'm being blunt, but it seems that WHC is actively trying to get rid of everything that we loved about Siber.

I am not sure why WHC bothers to post here. No one has anything good to say. Just curious why people talk so poorly about the only registrar with participation on this forum?

I like what WHC is doing. The 10-15 domainers that are bidding weekly in TBR is not the only business WHC is after. It takes 2 seconds to submit your cc info; what is the big deal? You can even save the info and it automatically puts it in.

Some people just love to complain I guess….

theinvestor said:

I am not sure why WHC bothers to post here. No one has anything good to say. Just curious why people talk so poorly about the only registrar with participation on this forum?

I like what WHC is doing. The 10-15 domainers that are bidding weekly in TBR is not the only business WHC is after. It takes 2 seconds to submit your cc info; what is the big deal? You can even save the info and it automatically puts it in.

Some people just love to complain I guess….

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Wow, just wow.

Just because a registrar participates on the forum is no reason to require everyone to kiss their ass. WHC could OWN the forum and as a paying customer, I'd still tell them what I think of their service, good and bad.

WHC is the most proactive registrar in Canada, the others are quietly sitting by.

WHC is implementing great new features so they are going to get a bit of critique as we tell them about the bugs.

If the new back order system is any indication I think we can expect to see some good things from WHC.

MapleDots said:

If the new back order system is any indication I think we can expect to see some good things from WHC.

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Exactly and this is good start to get them into the TBR game, but before they shut down Siber completely there is a lot of work to streamline the order and order retrieval system to compete with other registrars. Right now it's a kludge to fit a square TBR peg into a round Hosting Business hole, and I don't think anyone would dispute that.

It's kinda sad, but I find MyID's easier to use and better suited to preordering/viewing/editing than WHC's very basic TBR ordering system.