Like with other areas of online commerce, there is only a handful of places to go to if you want to purchase a website despite everything this blog is telling you.
Besides what’s listed below, there are plenty of other “marketplaces”, most of which are cloned sites themselves made with a script that’s going for around $50 at digitalpoint forums. So, if you want to buy a website, to flip or otherwise, your best bet is to talk to the owners directly. Oftentimes, however, it may be hard to find such a property and it may not even be for sale or you may have a trouble communicating or trusting — good! — the owners.
This is where just a few semi-decent online marketplaces come in:
Ebay — ebay.com
Everything is for sale at Ebay and websites are no exception. The only thing is Ebay is probably the worst place to go looking for a web site to buy. The listings are full of cloned crap where people really are only peddling worthless shit made by script from templates. It probably is impossible to find anything decent there at all, so my advice is don’t waste your time. A typical site on ebay sells for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, with the trend towards the low end of that range.
Flippa — flippa.com
Flippa is the artist, formerly known as Sitepoint Marketplace. The site buy/sell section of their forum got so popular that they realized they are not making the full amount of cash they could from it, so they spun that off and re-branded it as Flippa about a year ago. Along with skyrocketing fees, they did bring a better listing and search system, though.
You really can find anything on Flippa, from worthless clones to high-end sites. Most of the sites that do sell typically go for a few thousand dollars or less. Sometimes it’s possible to find something decent on Flippa, but the reality is it’s going to be overpriced and there will be pretty stiff competition, so most of the time it’s not worth it.
Flippa is a good place to hang around for a while to see how people develop sites and what they do with them. Also, occasionally, there is a gem in the raw that gets listed, but chances are you’re not going to — and shouldn’t — buy it.
Each listing on Flippa comes with a questions/answers section, where people are trying to fish out as much information as possible from the seller and the seller is trying to do their best and pretend they are selling a diamond and not a piece of shit useless bunch of bytes. The thing is, sometimes the sellers are going to explain their methods of building the site, their marketing approach and user retaining methods. That is what is of value there and that is what may be worth an occasional visit or infrequent hanging around. Don’t waste too much time there, though — all that information is available for free on other forums, including the following two.
Digitalpoint Forums– forums.digitalpoint.com
This was originally a company selling a (horrible) ISP management and billing system. Eventually, they also created a bunch of forums and that has taken off much better than their original product. By now, the Digitalpoint forums is one of the better known meeting places for all things internet commerce related.
In particular, there is a large Buy/Sell/Trade section of the forum, with one subsection being dedicated to selling sites. Most of the stuff there is small-scale, one reason to which being that it’s just a forum and it doesn’t come even with the most basic buyer/seller protection system. Not even the wool-over-your-eyes one like Flippa has. You can leave feedback in the form of iTrader points there, but really that is quite meaningless and you can really trust anyone based on that.
Because it’s a forum where people hang out, a lot of the sites that are sold there are sold by the forum participants. Because the majority of the people that hang out on such forums are losers, and given any kind of lack of buyer/seller protection, that’s pretty much what you can buy there: loser leftovers and failures.
Sites there seldom sell for more than a few hundred dollars, but unlike the Ebay clones and Flippa’s higher-end fraud sites, on Digitalpoint you can pick up a genuine — in terms of not being made to just flip — site. It may be a good idea to look there for a domain that has some traffic already or is listed in a few directories. Because people know they are mostly dealing with failures, they aren’t as pretentious about the selling price as the fraud teams on Flippa, asking for 10x the monthly profit for sites. So, in the end, if you are looking for something to really breathe a new life into, you might find something like that at Digitalpoint. But, in almost all cases you’d be better off just starting from scratch and not making some dumb kid, who couldn’t pull it off, $50 richer.
Do go to Digitalpoint to learn about doing things right in other sections of the forum, such as those discussing affiliate programs, Google’s Adsense and so on. Just don’t waste your time reading any threads that aren’t marked by 5 stars: the rest is newbies and losers whining about their incompetence and salivating on the success of a few folks, who know what they are doing and sometimes feel generous enough to disclose their methods.
The Warrior Forum — http://warriorforum.com/
This is one of the oldest internet marketing communities. It has value as a place to learn and that value is much higher than that of Digitalpoint. So, do go there to read and learn, the caliber of posters and the quality of discussions is much better than that of Digitalpoint in terms of signal to noise ratio.
Don’t go there to buy anything, including any of the “site templates” and “ready and researched niche sites”. It’s all cloned and useless crap that you can make yourself in a hearbeat. None of it is worth the asking price and most certainly none of it is well researched or is a cash cow — if it was, the seller would be milking that cow and not selling that to you. This place is arguably even worse than Ebay for a newbie, because the sellers already have you as their target audience, so they know exactly how to target you, what notes to play in their sales pitch in order to get your cash.
buysellwebsite.com– http://www.buysellwebsite.com
This is one of the oldest site selling marketplaces, but just don’t waste your time going there. There isn’t a whole lot going on there now and even when there is a few decent things listed there, they are going to be out of your league.
