How to Get Quick Delivery of GoDaddy (Private) Auction Wins

GoDaddy has been running a private auction featuring domain names from its NameFind portfolio. I have been following the auctions and bidding on a handful of domain names I like.

Yesterday, I won the auction for Molasses.com. As I shared on X, it was won, paid for, delivered, and a landing page was launched within a few hours. I want to share how I made that happen.

For a typical expiry auction at GoDaddy, I will let the automated payment process go through to pay for the domain name a couple of days after the auction closes. Since delivery can take more than a week sometimes, there’s no rush on my end to pay so I let it happen automatically.

For the Molasses.com auction, I logged into my GoDaddy Auctions account, navigated to my auction wins, and clicked the payment button. I submitted my payment manually – immediately. This is what I did the last time I won a private GoDaddy-run auction after seeing someone else share their auction-won domain name that was quickly redirected to their website. It worked then as it did yesterday.

Knowing the domain name was owned by a GoDaddy entity (NameFind), I reached out to my Account Managers at GoDaddy and Afternic along with GoDaddy domain investor liaison James Iles to let them know I paid for the domain name and asked for the domain name to be provisioned.

About an hour and a half after I submitted payment, I received an email notifying me the funds were secured. I logged in to my GoDaddy account and the domain name was there. I have no idea if that happened automatically or if one of the people I emailed helped facilitate the fast account change. My bet is that it was automatically pushed once the funds were secured.

In between the time I paid and the time the domain name was pushed to my account, I logged into my Carrd account and created the landing page for Molasses.com. It is similar to other landing pages I use for my more valuable domain names so it was quick to put together and launch on my LiquidWeb hosting account.

I had been asked how I was able to get this domain name delivered so quickly, and I am sure it is a combination of making a quick manual payment and the fact that the domain name was privately owned by a GoDaddy-controlled entity rather than an expiry auction or a domain name registered to a third party. I can’t guarantee this will work to get a domain name provisioned more quickly, but that’s how it happened for me.