After years of supporting GoDaddy (even through their rough times with public relations), I might be done defending them because of something they did to my fiance, Jacqueline.
GoDaddy Deletes a Domain Purchased From Their Site
So here’s the story. On Tuesday the 5th, Jacqueline calls me all excited and tells me that GoDaddy has new .health domains available. She purchases “woman.health” right then and there. She’s very excited about it. The price was $99.99 though Jacq had a coupon to drop it to 80.17. You can see that the purchase went through. Here’s the email confirmation:
Today, GoDaddy sends Jacq an email with the “helpful” subject line “We deleted some items for you.” As if they’re somehow doing her a favor. Look:
Note how the email says “If this is a mistake, please contact us.” Well yes it’s a mistake. This wasn’t Jacq’s request. GoDaddy changed their mind on the price.
Customer Service Doesn’t Help
Jacq proceeds to call “Breanna” who says that the domain was priced wrong. She puts Jacq on hold. She says it’s priced wrong. There’s nothing they can do. They can’t keep the sale because it’s not their policy. She says it’s Icann’s problem, and their price. And so they put it back on sale on the site. Here it is back on GoDaddy for $649:
(Mind you, Jacq bought it from GoDaddy.)
Breanna goes on to say that all .health domains cost a minimum of $500. Jacq says that’s crazy and proceeds to look up a bunch:
So clearly this isn’t accurate, either.
Breanna says “I don’t know. That must be incorrect.” Jacq asks if maybe there are more domains priced wrong? She couldn’t answer.
Jacq asked for a supervisor. Hold. Breanna says she can’t find a supervisor, but that even if she could find one, they wouldn’t be able to help her anyway, because they couldn’t honor the price, either.
No Resolution. GoDaddy Doesn’t Help
Now, I realize that this story will be published and lots of people will see this. So I panicked, because I realized that ultimately, Jacq wants this domain, so maybe I shouldn’t make a blog post talking about this without first securing the domain.
GoDaddy lets me buy it. Here it is:
So think about this.
- Jacq buys the domain for $80.17
- GoDaddy PULLS THE DOMAIN purchase from her account and emails her of this a day after the fact.
- GoDaddy puts the domain back up for sale for $649.
- I’m able to buy the domain Jacq thought she secured.
- GoDaddy customer service says they can’t do anything about this. And blames Icann.
So, do you think I can recommend GoDaddy as a domain registrar? Do you think I feel really comfortable with all MY domains being registered there, given this experience?
Jacq has over 100 domains registered there. I have a dozen or so. It won’t be exactly easy moving everything off, but what else can we do? Seems difficult to want to trust a company that does what they did and then couldn’t offer resolution.
What would you do?
Part 2 Coming Soon
In a subsequent post, I’ll tell you what any company of any size can do to avoid this example of bad customer service, and I’ll also share how this problem is resolved (or not).
