From my perspective (as an infrequent buyer on Sedo), a seller pushing a domain name to Sedo auction after receiving a private offer is a bad idea, and it may cause the seller to leave money on the table, as I will explain below.

A couple of weeks ago, I made an offer on a domain name that I wanted to buy for somewhere in the $1,000 range.  I don’t have a record of my opening offer, but it was in the ballpark of $500 and the owner’s counter offer was $1,000. Once I received the counter offer, I knew in my head that I was going to buy the domain name, but it was just a matter of how much I would spend, since the owner’s expectation and my expectation were in the same range.