Time invested is absolutely a valid point. For those sellers who try to use as many GD coupons as possible, and vote for credits (now unavailable) do you consider how much time this adds to the process? I stopped using coupons/voting a long time ago since the opportunity cost of my time is quite high.
Coming back to my earlier figures, I've done a little digging. The following stats are based on 352 names I have listed:
Average cost of domain acquisition: $18.78
Listing cost: $10
Total average cost of BB domain listing: $28.78
So a little less than my initial $40 guess.
The average sale price of my 14 sales is $2205, so after commission and design costs my average revenue per sale was $1445.
So based on my history,
Cost of domains listed: $10,648
Cost of rejected domains (assume 50% - this is a very rough approximation): $6,949
Total cost (excl. time): $17,597
Total revenue: $20,223
Profit: $2,626
ROI: ~15%
A couple of notes: I haven't included any renewal costs, I have sold names they rejected, and I expect (hope perhaps) to sell more of the names I currently have listed, so my expected return is certainly higher than the above. Just 2 or 3 more sales of my currently listed domains would lift my ROI significantly.
Hopefully the above will be useful to others to temper expectations of huge ROI. It's probably an exception rather than the rule, and I suspect very difficult to scale. Thankfully other domain activities are performing well, so I can afford to wait and see if BB returns improve.
Final disclaimer: I might have really poor stats. There are probably some portfolio owners with far higher sales rates and ROI. However I know with certainty quite a few portfolio owners of similar size with far worse stats.
