Lowball Offers are Not Necessarily Starting Points
April 23, 2009 by Anonymous
Filed under Price Negotiations
Some folks claim lowball offers for domain names are simply a starting points and a negotiating method to initiate negotiations, with an assumption both parties realize the real value of the domain.
The “starting point” view doesn’t work too well with me. If I start out with a reasonable offer of say $800 (not desiring negotiations) for a name which I feel is really worth no more than $800 (especially without any known traffic) and the seller counters with a price of say $11,000 I know right away an eventual sale is most unlikely, if not impossible.
Actually had that scenario happen recently when the owner later wrote again asking me to make a new higher offer but I countered with a new lower offer of $400 due to the declining economy and lesser desire for the name vs originally. He then indicated maybe he would take a price much closer to my original offer after all if I had not gone down in the offer, to which I said no more higher offers and the domain sale negotiations were therefore finished.
I believe low ball offers sour a potential transaction from the get go. Especially absurdly low offers. And if someone is really serious about acquiring a particular domain name, there is just no upside at all to starting out extremely low. It insults the seller by wasting their time. And it paints the buyer as rather unprofessional and/or not serious.
I’m all for negotiation though, just not the low ball technique.