The domain name candyfloss.com has come up for auction on Godaddy Expired Domain Names.
There are about 30 hours left and the current bid is $7k. As much of the action on auction sales happens towards the end, I would expect it to reach $10k+ . Will update here with the final price!
Until the domain name expired, it appears that a Shopify shop was hosted there. What’s slightly weird, is that to have an active Shopify Store, you would need to pay monthly. So, it is unlikely that someone would be paying for their hosting but yet forget to renew their domain name for about $10-$15.
My guess would be that the store was not very active, and someone forgot to cancel the charge and just didn’t bother to renew the domain name as they were no longer actively using it. The alternative to that is that the owner passed away and the remaining family didn’t know how to deal with it.
Whilst this doesn’t help with estimating its value, it does tell us that there are no major content assets that were on the site that could be continued. Or that there could be some inherited branding.
Its SEO value is very low with virtually no incoming links that are useful. Nor does it seem to have ranked over the last few years for any terms apart from candyfloss.
So, where is the value in this domain name and why is someone prepared $7k+ on buying it?
(and bear in mind that I may be totally missing something here in that there is an alternative meaning to the word).
Candy Floss (or cotton candy) is a food made out of sugar. It is common throughout the world and available from fairs. As it is an exact match domain, this has value. There is a record of candyfloss.org selling for $200 in 2015.
Candy Floss is also pink which could be good branding for a clothing (or similar) store looking to set up a new shop.
It could also be a good name for a start-up as it is highly memorable. However, the first word that comes to mind when I think of Candy Floss is “sweet”. Therefore, it would have to be good branding for a start-up that has a connection in some way that makes sense.
So, the main positives are that it is highly memorable and has ‘sweet’ branding.
A negative though, is that candy floss is also called cotton candy. So, it would only be useful in parts of the world that called the food candy floss else there would be confusion.
Another negative is that candy floss is not a profitable niche. You don’t sell candy floss online. People aren’t looking for information about it. Perhaps a candy floss machine company could find it useful but am not sure that it would be worth $7k+ for a domain name which can probably be improved upon for less money.
Perhaps a catering company or a restaurant could be good for it.
In summary, I do think that it is a cool domain. However, I find it difficult to see how it could be worth $7k to someone unless they already have a brand with that name – which probably isn’t trademarkable. I suspect that it will send to an end-user rather than a domain investor due to the high price already compared to the value.
I would probably pay around $2k-$2.5k for it for the novelty and brandable value but would look to resell rather than use.
UPDATE: candyfloss.com sold for $7,200 with 2 extra bids since I originally wrote this. I would usually expect to see more bidding in the last few hours of an auction. But perhaps, I was correct that the value was already seen as too high. Congratulations to the winner!