Namejet – Snapnames: 2 auction cancellations – 2 different approaches

In the past few days I learned that 2 domain name auctions that I had won were cancelled. And this was not the usual Go Daddy cancelled auction we all know and love. One was at Namejet and one was at Snapnames. The result was that I did not get the domain I won and paid for. From what I know both auctions were for expired pre-release domain names. The 2 domain auctions were cancelled by the respective registrar partners.

The Snapnames auction ended on the 8th of June 2013 and I only found out that I will not be getting the domain after I was trying to get a hold of the domain for many days. I was contacting both Snapnames and registrar support for days. I was trying to request the username and password from the registrar. Nothing. Finally on the 28th of November I was informed that I was going to be refunded the auction fee because the domain was not available.

Here is what snapnames support told me:

In rare instances we are unable to fulfill domain purchases. Unfortunately, this is the case in your recent purchases for continuous.org.

You will be refunded the purchase price of $69.00.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.

Please know that we cannot guarantee that we can acquire a domain, as stated in our terms and conditions sited below.

The Namejet auction ended on the 24 of November and 11 days after Namejet contacted me to inform me about the auction cancellation and the refund. The $69 were refunded the next day.  Here is what namejet support told me:

We regret to inform you that a domain you recently purchased through a pre-release auction has been cancelled by the registrar of record, as allowed by the NameJet Agreement. We are not provided with specific details and therefore do not have any further information to provide.

As a result of this Registrar request, we will be refunding the entire auction fee and removing the domain from your account within the next few days. Please be assured that this is a rare occurrence, and we do apologize for the inconvenience.

 

So Namejet was a lot faster to react to a cancelled auction while Snapnames didn’t inform me about it until I asked them more than 5 months after I had paid them. And Namejet refunded my fee the next day while Snapnames refunded the winning fee after a week and a support ticket reply. Also in general I have great difficulty on getting login details for my snapnames won domains. I spent almost 2 weeks trying to get login details for a few of my domains. The biggest problem is that snapnames does not update whois details for my won domains. So I can’t use the “request username” or “request password” of each registrar.