Terms

1. What this is

A marketplace where people sell domain names to each other, across every extension. We run the auction and we handle the money. We do not buy, sell, or value domains ourselves.

• We take the payment and we pay the seller. The buyer pays us, we hold the money while the domain moves, and the seller is paid once the change of ownership is confirmed. Buyer and seller do not exchange money with each other.
• We do not guarantee that a seller will transfer, that a buyer will pay, or that any domain is worth what it sells for.
• What we do is run the bidding honestly, publish the rules, and remove people who waste other people's time.

2. Accounts

• One account per person, business, or household.
• Sign-in is by emailed link — there is no password. A link works once and expires 15 minutes after you ask for it.
• An account must be active to bid or to list. We can restrict or close an account that breaks these terms, and section 10 describes the one case where that happens automatically.
• Your balance is the running total of your ledger. Money shown as reserved is committed against something and cannot be spent; available is what you can actually use.

3. Listing a domain

• Listing is free, with no limit on how many domains you list and no approval queue.
• You must be the registrant of the domain, or be authorised by them to sell it.
• You have to prove you control the domain. We give you a token; you publish it as a DNS TXT record; we look it up. Until that record resolves your listing is invisible to everyone but you, and nobody can bid on it.
• Claiming a name does not reserve it. Anyone may claim any domain — the listing goes to whoever proves control first. A claim nobody proves is deleted after 14 days.
• The lowest starting price is £20.

A DNS record proves you control the domain's DNS. That is not the same as being its registrant, and we do not pretend otherwise — it is the same standard used across the industry, and it is what we check.

4. Holding

• A verified listing sits in Holding with no closing date. There is no clock, no expiry, and nothing further for you to do. It waits.
• Anyone can bid on it. A bid does not start an auction by itself — see section 5.
• You can have as many domains here as you like, indefinitely, at no cost.

5. When a bid arrives

• The bid is recorded, the owner is told, and the listing is marked pending. No further bids are taken while the owner decides — there is no closing time yet, so a second bidder would be joining a race with no finish line.
• The owner has 7 days to pay £5.
• Paying moves the domain to Showcase and opens a 7-day auction from that moment. The bid that started it becomes the opening bid.
• The £5 is not refundable, under any circumstances: not if the domain fails to sell, not if the reserve is missed, not if the sale later falls through. Do not pay it unless you intend to sell.
• It is the only fee we charge before a sale. There is no listing fee and nothing to pay for a domain that never attracts a bid.

6. Showcase auctions

• Bidding is by proxy. You enter the most you will pay, and the engine bids the least needed to keep you in front, up to that figure.
• Your maximum is private. It is never shown to the seller, to other bidders, or anywhere in the page. Only the current price is public.
• Where two bidders enter the same maximum, whoever entered it first leads.
• You can raise your own maximum at any time. You cannot lower it.
• A seller cannot bid on their own listing.
• A bid commits you to buy. Bids cannot be retracted. The single exception is a bid on a Holding lot whose owner never pays: that lapses and you owe nothing.

Bid increments

The next valid bid is the current price plus the increment for that band:

From	Increment
£0	£1.00
£50	£5.00
£200	£10.00
£500	£25.00
£1,000	£50.00
£5,000	£100.00
£10,000	£250.00

Closing

• A bid in the final 10 minutes extends the auction — to 3 minutes from a bid you place yourself, or 2 minutes from one placed automatically by somebody's proxy.
• There is no cap on extensions. An auction ends when the bidding stops, which is why waiting until the last second gains you nothing.
• The advertised closing time never moves. The real one does, and both are shown on the lot.
• All timing is on our clock. Countdowns are calculated from the server, so a device with the wrong time cannot show an auction as closed while bidding is still open.

7. Reserves

• A reserve must be at or above the starting price.
• A visible reserve tells bidders whether it has been met, never the amount.
• A hidden reserve is not disclosed while bidding is open, and nothing on the page moves in response to it. The amount is published when the lot closes.
• We publish a cryptographic commitment to a hidden reserve before bidding opens, and the amount and its nonce at close. Anyone can recompute the commitment and confirm the figure was fixed in advance rather than chosen once the bids were in. That is a check on us as much as on the seller.
• If the reserve is not met the domain does not sell, and the promotion fee is not returned.

8. Commission

• We charge 5.0% of the final price on sales above £100. At or below £100 there is no commission.
• No surcharges, and no difference between tiers or types of domain.
• Commission is calculated at close, payable by the seller, and falls due only once the transfer has completed. If the sale fails, no commission is owed.

9. Completing a sale

At close the highest bidder is committed to buy and the seller is committed to sell, at the closing price. From that point we handle the money, in this order:

1. The buyer pays us the closing price, within 3 days of the auction ending.
2. We tell the seller the money has arrived. Only then do they begin the transfer.
3. The seller moves the domain into the buyer's name, within 21 days of the close.
4. We confirm the change of ownership ourselves. We do not take either party's word for it.
5. We pay the seller the price less our commission.

• The seller sees no money until the domain has moved. That is the point of us being in the middle.
• If the seller does not transfer, the buyer gets everything back — the full price, commission included, because there was no completed sale to charge for.
• If the buyer does not pay within the 3 days, the sale fails and nothing is owed by anyone.
• Failing to complete, as buyer or as seller, counts against your account and may cost you the ability to trade here.
• We hold money only for as long as a sale is in progress. It is not an account you can pay into or draw on for anything else.

10. Removal and account closure

• If the owner of a pending listing does not pay within the 7 days, the bid is cancelled and the domain comes off the site. The bidder owes nothing.
• That owner's account is also closed. Listing a domain is an offer to sell it; taking a bid and then walking away wastes a commitment somebody else made in good faith.
• A closed account cannot bid, list, or promote, and its remaining unsold listings are removed. Auctions already running are left to finish — the people bidding in them have done nothing wrong.
• We will also remove listings, and close accounts, for domains you do not have the right to sell.

11. Changes to these terms

The figures above — minimums, fees, increments, extension times — are settings, and we can change them. A change applies to listings and auctions started after it. Two things are fixed for the life of a lot once they apply: the promotion fee you paid, and the commission rate at the moment your auction closed.