Need To Sell Your Website? Not On Flippa You Don't

There's been very few reasons in my online working experience to sit down and write something like this. But this is something I felt I needed to share with all you nice people out there. There's been a recent surge online in something called website flipping. This is when people build a website and then sell it on and ideally make a nice profit.

Now website flipping isn't new and it certainly isn't rocket science but it is a profitable business to be in. I should know I've been doing it for several years now - long before the current craze kicked in. With any craze there comes a splurge of products telling you how to flip your websites and websites that want to act as brokers for your site flipping efforts. And one of the most popular of these is Flippa.

So recently I decided to break from my normal working pattern and use Flippa to sell a site. And the problems began almost immediately. Listing a website for sale online used to be a simple process - not wrapped up in 12 listing options and stuck inside an interface that's almost unbearable to use. But then beauty is in the eye of the beholder no? So I worked through the interface and got my site listed for the sum of $94 - including the $19 actual listing fee. The rest of that amount is all "extras". There's also the 5% success fee at the end of your auction....so you wind up paying again.

But I'm going off on a tangent. So almost $100 later and having waded my way through a user interface designed by the Spanish Inquisition my site was listed.

Now here's where the main problem is. It's not with Flippa itself but with the buyer culture that Flippa and the whole website flipping craze has created. What I mean is this. The people who bid at Flippa are amateurs and cheapskates who expect to get a website for about 1/3 of its actual value. Or less if they can haggle you down to that. That might sound harsh but keep reading and you'll understand why I came to this conclusion.

So what is a legitimate and profitable business has become a case of dealing with the lowest bidders in a sea low bidders. The accepted "norm" at Flippa is selling or buying a site for 10x net monthly income. What?! So something I've created on and worked on for years you want to walk away with for 10x its monthly income? You're kidding right? The normal way of evaluating what your site is worth is to calculate 12x - 36x monthly net income (site income minus any other expenses). Nobody in their right mind should be selling a properly structured and profitable website for 10x monthly income. Ever.

So the bids started coming in slowly. Increments of $100 and $250 on a site worth almost $4,000. This is when then penny dropped. Flippa isn't a place where you're dealing with professional buyers. It's a bargain hunters market. This became even more apparent when I started getting private messages from buyers telling me I was wasting my time listing the site at a BIN (Buy It Now) of $3,200 and that the best I'd do is maybe $1,400 for the site. And more messages saying "Do the math guy....it's not worth that kinda money". Day-by-day the situation got worse.

Now there's obviously a few tricks being played on Flippa too. One of the ways I got caught was one "serious bidder" asking me to reduce the BIN to the reserve price and he'd bid straight away. So I dropped the public price of the site and he then did absolutely nothing. I'd just taken a hit of $400 on the value of my site and now there was no way out except downwards. That's a quick and sneaky way to get a discount isn't it?

Plus if you have two more or more bidders working with each other to drive your price down by doing this....well...it can be very profitable for that type of buyer but financially devastating to the seller. One bidder asks you to drop the public price to your reserve price and then other bidder haggles you down another few hundred. And once you drop your price you can't put it back up again - you've just publicly shown the minimum price you'll accept for your site. There isn't a hole deep enough or a hell hot enough for these people.

So as you can see it wasn't a productive experience for me and not one that I'm going to be repeating anytime soon. I value my websites and there's no way on Gods green earth that I'm going to sell anything I work on for 10x monthly income.

Oh and how much did I get for the site in the end? I had to accept a bid of $2,400 from an external source. The amateurs at Flippa had wasted so much of my time I had to take a lower offer to cover my investment in a new web property that I'm working on. That $2,400 is about $1,400 less than the site is actually worth. So in reality Flippa actually indirectly helped me lose money on the sale of the site. Shocking.

If you're selling auto-blogs or crappy MFA (Made for Adsense) sites and only want to make 1/3 of what your site is actually worth then Flippa is ideal for you. If not then check out the resource box at the end of this article for an alternative website flipping service with real buyers who have real money.

So you're wondering how to sell your website and not get ripped off? There's a ton of places you can sell your website online but you need to be informed before you wind up selling your site for a lot less than it's worth. So to learn more about selling your website (you won't need to buy anything) just click here.