The domain KitchenBowl.com was a surprise drop from Amazon’s registrar; as an exact match of “kitchen bowl” the domain was used as a social community for foodies to share & discover recipes.
Between 2015 and 2020 the domain and assorted app most likely generated millions of page-views and when the domain dropped inexplicably, bidders went after it once it was caught by DropCatch.
We followed the auction that closed at a whopping $5,673 dollars. One of the participants was the Domain King, Rick Schwartz, who believed he was the winner of the auction for KitchenBowl.com.
The Domain King had placed a max bid of $5,623 dollars and the clock ticked all the way down to zero, indicating he had won the auction.
To Rick’s surprise, that wasn’t the case. A bidder won the auction at $50 dollars more than Rick’s proxy bid; quite understandably, Rick questioned the legitimacy of the process via a series of tweets:
DropCatch MUST have a better answer than what I got.
The whistle blew. The game was over. How???
After sitting and bidding for half-hour or more!!#Domains #DomainNames pic.twitter.com/X9m79VPOYK— Rick Schwartz ๐ The DomainKingยฎ ๐ Since 1995 ๐ (@DomainKing) May 27, 2022
In recent days, we’ve witnessed the same issue on DropCatch and have notified them about an existing glitch.
It seems that the in-browser code and the one running on the DropCatch server get out of sync, losing the bidder’s ranking when a higher bid is made but without signaling an update to the browser.
In other words, unless a bidder forcibly refreshes the browser, something less easy on a mobile device, the browser displays an outdated bid. The timer clocks down to zero, all while fresh bids have taken over the auction’s fate.
Hopefully, DropCatch will fix this issue soon; in the meantime, you might want to get an add-on such as Tab Reloader for Firefox.