Places to Sell Websites

GNews

GNews

White Hat Genius
BuSo Pro
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Nov 7, 2016
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Well, it's a new year and a new era for selling websites, if you were flipping sites as a kid like me. I worked within this niche of the web back around 2006-2009, then left for several years. As I've found eCommerce re-emerging to the forefront of internet hustles, I need to figure out how things move now.


PLACES I'VE SOLD SITES:
I used to meet great people on "Digital Point Forum" (here) which long ago died off. Just a spam board now i'm sure.

Then came Flippa (here), which still works but the quality of this site today is pretty low. They allow reverse engineers to thrive there, many coming from 3rd World nations and have nasty attitudes. I even had a guy threaten me in an auction comment. He said if i didn't give him my analytics He'd report me to flippa. Hilarious because his intent was clear, just wanted the keywords. Regardless, the comment ruined my auction b/c it would create doubt for buyers, surely to see such negativity on an auction. Flippa, wouldn't refund me, just said they would reprimand the guy.. a WASTE.


Reddit ROCKS! This is the big surprise. I've found the seemingly most legit leads to buyers from reddit. These subreddits got quality feedback:
... A-grade:
https://www.reddit.com/r/buysellwebsites/
https://www.reddit.com/r/buyselldomain/
... B-grades
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sellwebsites/
https://www.reddit.com/r/sellwebsite/

Though I did not close on a deal, the buyers were very clear in their focus here. Any reverse engineer potentials were easily weeded out and usually foreign, middle east. The 'Hi Mate' type of replies (red flag words).

The serious buyer inquiries from reddit, responded slower but were immediate in providing an immediate form of communication (phone or skype). One even had an email, but it also gave clarity that the person had history.


FEInternational -
They have a good reputation with a lot of people. My personal experience was a chase down. The evaluation request on the website got no response. Someone here on BUSO gave me an email, from which I got a quicker response.

I have a great product and had someone purchased it in August 2019 for the $24k i asked, they would have seen $20k+ new sales by January 2020. Their lack of foresight was obvious to me. They are a stick to the script company that are good for ABC format, but they I bet they pass over some home run projects. And with that format, I can also image their buyer base isn't the best available.

And keep in mind, I'm a lazy person. I'm not doing the analytics studies, I'm not the best at targeting keywords, I just have a small scale format and pass projects off to others.



SHARE YOU OTHERS?
Know some other sources to sell website projects that include a domain? List them below in replies.
 
Agreed on Flippa... quality of sites on there isn't very good. Haven't tried Reddit.

Namepros is another source, but more focused on domains than websites.
 
I just sold one of my smaller sites with Motion Invest. It was a nice experience. Since it's a smaller site, the big boys (FE International, Alpha Investors, Empire Flippers) wouldn't touch it.

They paid 25x L12M revenue and sent the funds via Friends and Family to my PayPal.

Listing on Flippa or a public forum would have yielded me more $, but not a significant amount more. Not worth it when I considered the risk of someone seeing what my site was about and stealing the niche on their much higher authority domain. Additionally, dealing with buyers can be annoying. Especially when the site is for such a low amount. I sold a site for like $2,000 on Flippa last year and I got more questions when selling that then I did either of my 6 figure sales.
 
JamaicanMoose said:
I just sold one of my smaller sites with Motion Invest. It was a nice experience. Since it's a smaller site, the big boys (FE International, Alpha Investors, Empire Flippers) wouldn't touch it.

They paid 25x L12M revenue and sent the funds via Friends and Family to my PayPal.

Listing on Flippa or a public forum would have yielded me more $, but not a significant amount more. Not worth it when I considered the risk of someone seeing what my site was about and stealing the niche on their much higher authority domain. Additionally, dealing with buyers can be annoying. Especially when the site is for such a low amount. I sold a site for like $2,000 on Flippa last year and I got more questions when selling that then I did either of my 6 figure sales.
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What's a small site to you? Monthly earnings of what?
 
JamaicanMoose said:
They paid 25x L12M revenue and sent the funds via Friends and Family to my PayPal.
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Just a heads up to anyone, please be careful with this.

I'd hate to be the person waiting on a PayPal payment from them when their PayPal account gets iced. If they're doing any kind of volume, a pretty blatant ToS violation seems like it will catch up to them sooner or later, especially when it's being discussed publicly.

I'm not sure if PayPal would ever go as far as to reverse a payment for using that feature improperly, but there are enough horror stories of people losing their PayPal accounts without doing anything wrong, that it just seems inevitable when you're avoiding thousands of dollars in fees (and losing any protection, too.)

Just my 0.02, but personally if I had to choose between two marketplaces to sell my site, I'd never use the one that is known to fraudulently send F&F payments to avoid fees. Just seems like asking for trouble.

Maybe I'm totally off-base here and Motion Invest would be willing to comment on this practice? Are they members here by any chance?

Back to OP's question, I have dealt with Flippa and a handful of brokers and marketplaces to sell sites, and @andreint had the smoothest process by far. Next time I've got a site for sale, he'll be the first person I reach out to. I've seen brokers earning commissions of five and six figures who were less on-the-ball than he was, even for the smaller site I sold him.
 
Potatoe said:
Just a heads up to anyone, please be careful with this.

I'd hate to be the person waiting on a PayPal payment from them when their PayPal account gets iced. If they're doing any kind of volume, a pretty blatant ToS violation seems like it will catch up to them sooner or later, especially when it's being discussed publicly.

I'm not sure if PayPal would ever go as far as to reverse a payment for using that feature improperly, but there are enough horror stories of people losing their PayPal accounts without doing anything wrong, that it just seems inevitable when you're avoiding thousands of dollars in fees (and losing any protection, too.)

Just my 0.02, but personally if I had to choose between two marketplaces to sell my site, I'd never use the one that is known to fraudulently send F&F payments to avoid fees. Just seems like asking for trouble.

Maybe I'm totally off-base here and Motion Invest would be willing to comment on this practice? Are they members here by any chance?

Back to OP's question, I have dealt with Flippa and a handful of brokers and marketplaces to sell sites, and @andreint had the smoothest process by far. Next time I've got a site for sale, he'll be the first person I reach out to. I've seen brokers earning commissions of five and six figures who were less on-the-ball than he was, even for the smaller site I sold him.
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The payment option was either wire transfer or PayPal. My bank was being a dick about the wire transfer, so after a few days they sent it PayPal. We also signed an Asset Purchase Agreement, so I could always go after them should the payment reverse. It's such a small amount that it's not worth either party risking their accounts over.
 
Empire Flippers exists as well and moves a lot of inventory. My understanding is they fill a gap lower than FE International does, where they'll take "lower" earning sites and even PBN-backed sites, as long as it's disclosed of course.
 
@JamaicanMoose That's cool, I just meant specifically about using friends and family payments for business, and more in the larger picture if it's something they make a habit out of. For a smaller amount I'm even more perplexed about violating ToS (risking accounts) just to save 3% but to each their own.
 
Have sold three sites on flippa one great experience, one bad one and one in the middle where I had to keep messaging buyer after I had transferred over the site for 1 month to pay finally asking flippa to get involved.

The bad experience was I sold an amazon fba account transferred all data to the buyer and changed all amazon information, then the buyer decided he didnt want to pay I had to change all the information and the fba account was blocked by amazon because of suspicious activity i.e me changing billing details back and forth...amazon will ban you for anything so be careful since flippas buyers arent vetted at all, its a crapshoot.

Empire flippers looks good I started proceedings recently with them for a midsized site of mine but their fee is really high at 15%, after you pay your taxes on your earnings and add that 15% selling your business starts looking less and less exciting.
 
tyealia said:
Have sold three sites on flippa one great experience, one bad one and one in the middle where I had to keep messaging buyer after I had transferred over the site for 1 month to pay finally asking flippa to get involved.

The bad experience was I sold an amazon fba account transferred all data to the buyer and changed all amazon information, then the buyer decided he didnt want to pay I had to change all the information and the fba account was blocked by amazon because of suspicious activity i.e me changing billing details back and forth...amazon will ban you for anything so be careful since flippas buyers arent vetted at all, its a crapshoot.

Empire flippers looks good I started proceedings recently with them for a midsized site of mine but their fee is really high at 15%, after you pay your taxes on your earnings and add that 15% selling your business starts looking less and less exciting.
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Check out Investors Club - no fees. They make money by selling access to their marketplace for a monthly fee to buyers.
 
JamaicanMoose said:
Check out Investors Club - no fees. They make money by selling access to their marketplace for a monthly fee to buyers.
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Thanks. I've been lagging the pursuit of my 'next phase' of my visions from 2019................
All the selling platforms I can use, would be appreciated.

Anyone ever sold a majority stake of their biz and retained a % of profit?

Every business i've ever sold in the past was bought by people with 'more know how' ... so they just scaled it all up and made incredible amounts (sharing with me insights on ways to improve myself). The big diff, they all had money to hire real professionals to maximize all aspects of the business.

The ROI's were INCREDIBLE though.

example:
Sold a biz i made $$$k over 6 years with for $$k, because I was purely bored and the guy who bough it... already got aquirement deals with Yahoo!, so i wanted to watch how he worked it and move on to my next visions.

He invested $$k more in hiring a designer who did MTV's website to redo my site. Then paid $$k more for for seo services. He then paid another $$k to people to travel to events related to my niche (i already had entry into these events b/c my brand was the first in its niche) and build with brands.

Shortly there after, he was earning $$k to $$$k per month.. had deals with major brands, etc.

Had i kept just 10% of profit shares, I would have probably made like 50k-$100k, relaxing.

But, with the information I gained, I cleared probably just around $100k either way ... doing smaller flips, etc. But soon after, I found affiliate marketing... Gave all of that up.

Anyhow, anbyody ever sold and kept a % of future profits as part of deal?
 
If you have a good site, flippa is also not bad.
One thing about flippa is that a lot of genuine buyers still lurk there.

If you are a good negotiater yourself, it is a really great place to get buyer leads.

I still cannot figure out the As and Bs of copyrighting and i still pay to get all my sales copy done, but one time I made such a damn good sales pitch on flippa, pretty much like what you have seen on 6 pack secret and the like and i got several queries on PM. I made the auction open and without BIN. AUCTION was going fine but i also got many PMs and emails and sold a website for more than any brokers would have gotten me. For just the flippa listing fee.

I filtered the buyers by their way of communication.
I used Escrow for the payment.

Just for the more curious.
It was a general site with no niche and nil buyer intent traffic with shitty adsense clicks that i wanted to get rid off.
Sold for 32 K.
Search traffic of 8-10 k a day.

As a sign of good karma, i bought a few good guest posts and links on real websites for about 1000 usd from the above amount because i had a few PBN Links that i owned very privately and i wanted to swap them out.

The traffic went up to 50 k a day all of a sudden as those links pushed up about a million long tail all of a sudden lol. My only regret was that i should have done that a few months earlier and it would have sold for 200k
 
bopeep said:
If you have a good site, flippa is also not bad.
One thing about flippa is that a lot of genuine buyers still lurk there.

If you are a good negotiater yourself, it is a really great place to get buyer leads.

I still cannot figure out the As and Bs of copyrighting and i still pay to get all my sales copy done, but one time I made such a damn good sales pitch on flippa, pretty much like what you have seen on 6 pack secret and the like and i got several queries on PM. I made the auction open and without BIN. AUCTION was going fine but i also got many PMs and emails and sold a website for more than any brokers would have gotten me. For just the flippa listing fee.

I filtered the buyers by their way of communication.
I used Escrow for the payment.

Just for the more curious.
It was a general site with no niche and nil buyer intent traffic with shitty adsense clicks that i wanted to get rid off.
Sold for 32 K.
Search traffic of 8-10 k a day.

As a sign of good karma, i bought a few good guest posts and links on real websites for about 1000 usd from the above amount because i had a few PBN Links that i owned very privately and i wanted to swap them out.

The traffic went up to 50 k a day all of a sudden as those links pushed up about a million long tail all of a sudden lol. My only regret was that i should have done that a few months earlier and it would have sold for 200k
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Good information. I am quite surprised by the jump. Did you buy the links to your homepage or to individual pages to experience this?
 
Creator said:
Good information. I am quite surprised by the jump. Did you buy the links to your homepage or to individual pages to experience this?
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It was totally Random/unplanned. I think a mix of links. Some were on the home page and some inner pages.

The point was how I had a lot of genuine buyers who connected me. I just added the last line as an interesting tidbit. It might have as well been a google loterry. There were a hundreds of pages that targeted "* Keyword" were on page 3/4th for a while and they all jumped to page 1, so it was not a few targeted keywords.
 
Flippa's daily site sales are low to me.
Add in the fact, so many of those sales will fail.
 
So I just realized, I never communicated with EmpireFlippers.com

Anyone have experience with them? Discount codes for listing?

I like their setup. Deposit required for buyers to get information. Sellers have to pay a decent fee to get listed.

Any red lines here i'm not seeing?
 
I sold a site with them last year. Good guys.

It was for a small flip, around 40k EUR.

It was an affiliate site, and basically we moved the site except for domain, waited one week to verify income, then transferred domain and social accounts over to the new owner.

There were some tire kickers, but overall I felt like they valued my time, and I only did 2 calls I believe.
 
I have sold two sites one with Empire Flippers. The last one was six figures. Both times the buyers have been new to the online business world.

When you have an affiliate monetized content site then the selling process is relatively straight forward. I did not even need to have a call with Empire Flippers or a seller during the last sale.

Remember that the listing price or listing multiplier may not be the one you sell the site for. Buyers negotiate the price down.
 
I've sold a lot of sites in the last few years (all affiliate sites) through a mixture of Flippa, private Facebook groups/forums, Empire Flippers and FE International.

Of those, I will never use FE International again. I sold a few sites with them and overall they really don't do enough to earn their 15% compared to Empire Flippers. They also tried to push me to sell below asking price to the Income Store owner more than once, which felt kinda weird.

Next time I have a site ready to sell, I'm trying out Investors Club to save on that 15% I've been paying in the past.
 
Just post a bst and do your own vetting.

The paperwork is straight forward and risks are overhyped.

Your broker is not your friend and doesn’t do anything you can’t figure out with room temperature iq and a little reading.

This forums totally got enough capital floating around. I’d like to see some open flips happen here.

We’re just lacking in a good itrader equivalent to encourage deal volume on platform and separate the shit posters from deal makers.
 
EyesExist said:
what facebook groups?
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In the past I've joined groups for the niche I have the site in that I want to sell and had success with that. Right now the Flipping Websites group is the only one that I'm currently in where I've recently sold/bought sites.
 
blackcanary said:
In the past I've joined groups for the niche I have the site in that I want to sell and had success with that. Right now the Flipping Websites group is the only one that I'm currently in where I've recently sold/bought sites.
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is this the actual name of the group? "Flipping websites group" ?
 
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