GoDaddy employee here. I don't work on the shopping cart, but I can say that we're under "new management" (new CEO started in January) and there's currently a huge push to completely revamp the GoDaddy homepage as well as the shopping cart and other pages.
Management is under no illusions that the old/current system is far too convoluted so the company is pushing through some pretty dramatic changes.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of code to change so the changes are going to take some time to get deployed to customers.
As far as this particular incident, I can also confirm that if you have auto-renewal turned off, when the domain expires there's a cost to GoDaddy to get that domain back.
I was on a support call during orientation when someone had something similar happen. Their CC had expired so the domain didn't auto-renew and someone else purchased the domain after the grace-period. The only thing that customer service could do was offer (a paid) service to try to put them in contact with the new domain owner (also used GoDaddy to purchase it) and assist in transferring the domain back.
If you want, feel free to email me exactly what steps caused the problem and I'll forward that on to QA for that group to try to reproduce and perhaps resolve the issue.
"As far as this particular incident, I can also confirm that if you have auto-renewal turned off, when the domain expires there's a cost to GoDaddy to get that domain back."
Specifically "when a domain expires".
A deletion and an expiration are two different things.
A domain name (with respect to .com .net .org .info) is automatically renewed at the registry level (Verisign/Afilias/PIR) upon "expiration". The registrar (godaddy) then has to issue an explicit "delete" command in order to get the money that they automatically pay (and have to have in an account at the registries) to credit their account. And they have 45 days to do so. After that they are out the money that it costs them for the domain.
Consequently the following is true:
1) When a domain expires there is no cost to godaddy to get the domain back.
2) When a domain is deleted (and goes into "redemption") there is a cost to godaddy to get the domain back.
3) Godaddy doesn't need to delete the domain (and save the reg fee ) until 45 days past "expiration". As a matter of course most registrars (including us) don't wait until the last minute (system glitch might cause not deleting domains that customer didn't pay for).
4) If "auto renewal" is "turned off" I don't see what that has to do with the time/date the domain is deleted at all. That's just a method of payment.
Using the same registrar: Yes - only the same registrar has access to the domain. Built into the system (.com .net .org .info). No way at all around that.
By the same person: According to ICANN/Registries: Yes. But there is nothing to prevent a registrar from putting it in someone elses name in the sense that there is nobody policing that action. Also there is nothing to prevent a registrar from putting the name back in the original owners name and changing it a day, hour, week, month later either. (But as I said even though Registrars have to certify they aren't doing this there is nobody enforcing this at all.)
Management is under no illusions that the old/current system is far too convoluted so the company is pushing through some pretty dramatic changes.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of code to change so the changes are going to take some time to get deployed to customers.
As far as this particular incident, I can also confirm that if you have auto-renewal turned off, when the domain expires there's a cost to GoDaddy to get that domain back.
I was on a support call during orientation when someone had something similar happen. Their CC had expired so the domain didn't auto-renew and someone else purchased the domain after the grace-period. The only thing that customer service could do was offer (a paid) service to try to put them in contact with the new domain owner (also used GoDaddy to purchase it) and assist in transferring the domain back.
If you want, feel free to email me exactly what steps caused the problem and I'll forward that on to QA for that group to try to reproduce and perhaps resolve the issue.