Besides Flippa, where else do you look for websites to buy?

Business
1

Flippa is great, but I am wondering how else people find sites to buy. I would appreciate any input that people have.

thanks,
Paul

2

Hi there,
DigitalPoint have a marketplace.

3

Godaddy and [URL=“http://sedo.com/”]sedo have auctions (focus is on domains). [URL=“http://websiteproperties.com/”]Website Properties have just announced a new marketplace.

4

eBay and Craigslist can also sometimes work.

5

is listing domains on sedo is free?
they are asking me something like certification and my passport copy, what to do…? should i send them, will they ask for money afteR?

6
7

Try dannotrade.com. It is free to post auctions there.

8

Paul, as HAWK says, digitalpoint have a marketplace. However, it’s a lot different to Flippa, is free to list and therefore attracts lower quality sites and it’s anarchy in there!

There are brokers like the ones mentioned - websitebrokers and websiteproperties, there are business listing sites such as businessesforsale.com and others. I’ve compiled a list of places with some comments on each one which you can find here.

9

Hi Paul,

I recently compiled, ordered and ranked 35 sites that focus on Websites for Sale and have an acceptable ‘crap to decent stuff’ ratio (working title!)

35 places to find Websites for Sale ranked

Hope this helps

Justin

10

I found a list of websites marketplaces here
http://flippingplanet.com/forum/threads/6-Master-List-of-Active-Webmaster-Forums-and-Marketplaces
hope that helps

11

Personally, I would stay away from marketplaces where sites are publicly listed for sale. Once a site’s domain name, traffic stats, and revenue are made public, it becomes a target for competitors. The seller might be happy to have made a sale, but as a buyer, I would not want to buy a site that has been “exposed,” if you will. There are plenty of people who sit there every day going through Flippa listings to see what sites they can rip off (i.e., use the public data to then build their own version of the site instead of buying it from the seller at Flippa).

In my opinion, the best way to buy a website is to make an offer on a site that’s not even for sale. You do some research to find what might be a good fit for you, and then you contact the site owner to make an offer. Yes, it can be a lot of work, and you might get turned down by a lot of people, but if you find a site whose owner is willing to sell, at least you won’t be risking the site’s data being publicly disclosed to competitors, who may soon become your competitors if you end up buying the site.

Another thing you could do is advertise that you buy websites (e.g., putting a link in your sig that says, “I buy websites”). You could then direct people to an online form that asks a series of questions about the site. The questions are there to help you weed out the types of sites that you’re not interested in purchasing.

12

http://www.netbartr.comNetBartr is a good one.

13

Hey CipherMode,

I agree with everything you’ve wrote to an extent (buying private definitely allows you find those hidden gems, and usually at a much better valuation than buying publicly when dealing with sites > $10K), but I wouldn’t advise anyone to write off all public auctions - they’ll miss out on a huge (and growing) part of the market.

Undoubtedly people will go through Flippa for ideas but if there was any actual stats on how many people actually follow through and execute I’m sure it would be relatively low.

IMO, if the only asset a site has is an original idea and nothing else then it’s probably screwed one way or the other. What makes most purchases good purchases is the months of hard / smart work the owner has put in to get all the ‘gears’ working in the right way to drive traffic and monetise it.