Question for Warriors about a New Flippa site

Hi Angel,

I don't mean to be the bringer of doom and gloom but you're undertaking a massive task. I've personally seen about 30 marketplaces fail in the last year at least and those are just the ones who either made contact or that I noticed.

Forgive me for not answering the questions directly (although I'm not sure about statcounter being able to weed out scammers), but I would say three things being missed by those who fail are

1) Critical Mass. Don't plan to spend later on - give it everything you have early on you'll need an influx of both buyers and sellers to hit critical mass.

2) Stay away from starter sites (no revenue or traffic). A marker does exist but it's way too crowded

3) Have some human quality control - if a site looks like it sucks, refuse to allow on your marketplace. You'll p!ss some people off but ultimately build a better business.

The long answer is here
Building a new Marketplace to showcase Websites for Sale

and here

Marketing and Critical Mass – Part 2 of Building a new Marketplace

Best of Luck

Justin

thank you, flipfilter, I'm going to read the info you gave me. I appreciate your input

Thanks Michelle for your input as well......it is appreciated.

Hi Angel,

First off welcome to being active on the WF :-)

I've flipped a fair number of sites in my time.

Personally I'd rather pay a small fee per listing - Flippa have gotten carried away with what they're charging and I've found the place just crammed full of the lowest bidders - they want established sites for 3x monthly income which is mental

Escrow is really suited to bigger flips over $5,000 so I'd prefer to have both options. Paypal for smaller sales and Escrow for the bigger ones.

I think the key is to establish a market place that presents valuable sites and discourages the lowest bidder mentality. I've used Flippa once or twice and won't ever use it again to be honest.

Just my 2 cents though :-)

I wouldn't pay a membership fee. I want to list the number of sites I want when I want. I'd rather pay a standard fee rather than a standard fee and then get gouged like Flippa does for a success fee.

As for Statcounter, Paypal, Escrow. I prefer to make my own decisions of how to accept payment and what stats to use, but I can see some benefit in Statcounter stats being mandatory.

yea youre right about a lot of that suzanne...question tho would you rather pay say 20 bucks to list no backend or 9.99 to list with backend?

k ty for your input

I think you've got a big project ahead of you in all honesty, serious.

As a developer this is a big one, and not only are you faced with the technical, and logistic issues, but also the traffic.

Flippa is an offspring of the Sitepoint Marketplace, in which case means, they already had the customers, they just provided a solution.

Which essentially is what internet marketing is all about.

Not the other way round.

PS. Oh, and unless you're confident that you will attract buyers and sellers, charging should be the LAST thing on your mind.

Hi Angel:

I do not want to pay $120/yr. Just in case.

It is better to charge me a percentage of what I sell, that way I am willing to take the risk on a new site that has low traffic and little exposure.

When ebay first started they were real nice. Then later they turned into feebay AND made life terrible for me. Try to keep being nice. Long time customers are like gravy. Flippa use to be nice when they were sitepoint, but not anymore.

For example, I have a lot of small $5/day adsense type sites that I could sell, but my fear is getting competition into niches that are small and not growing...

Having to post all my data is an excellent opportunity for a scammer. They can then do a reverse engineer. Also, stealing my content - pictures and body copy is easy. However, I would not mind selling to established buyers with a good rep.

I'd rather have a straight listing fee - no monthly and no commission when it sells.

I don't want to be forced to use escrow.

I would like to have a better system to get rid of deadbeat buyers (and scammer sellers). I'm not really sure having a linked in account or facebook account really proves someone is honest Like Suzanne said the only thing that really works is the track record of positive transactions.

Of course, I want an automated BIN feature that makes them pay right away and if no payment is processed right away then the auction gets immediately put back on the block.

In case of a sale without BIN and the buyer does not pay, I want to be able to relist free of charge in a reasonable amount of time after I have had no response from buyer (I usually give them 3 days).

As mentioned above, the real trick is going to be to get enough inventory there to make buyers come over and buy sites. I think you are going to have to let sellers list for free and then do something to attract the buyers so that lost of sales are made.

If you want my honest opinion, I'm not willing to pay anything to list my sites for sale on your site until I can see that you have a willing buyer base like they do over at Flippa. I'm not even sure that I would want to try it for free because it takes time to list stuff and I wouldn't be able to have it listed at Flippa during that time (as per their rules.. unless they changed that one?). The only thing that might persuade me is if I knew that the eventual fees would be so attractive that I might want to spend my time helping you build your site by adding my own sites for sale.

I dont mean to sound mean ... lol.... but it kind of came out that way - just trying to give my honest thoughts to help you out.

Lee

The big key factor here is getting the buyers. Unfortunately for sellers, we've been stuck with Flippa, who cares little about sellers and everything about buyers. That's because they have the buyers, and if you don't ... the sellers aren't going to waste their time and money listing.

I used to use Flippa a lot. With all their changes and the price gouging and their general attitude towards sellers, I use them a lot less.

I used to also be a buyer on Flippa, but the place is so full of junk it makes my eyes bleed browsing through the crap. I see scam after scam being run on Flippa and it just turns me off.

I see many sellers selling the same old sites over and over again ... like the traffic sites. I see sellers buying $5 MMR crap and launching it on a domain and soaking some poor newbie for over $100 for it. I see buyers who never pay after winning the auction. I see sellers who try to get away with the money without delivering the sites. It's risky to do business there if you don't want to use escrow, and for smaller purchases, I don't want to use escrow.

There's sellers using fake traffic to bolster there traffic stats. Fake screenshots for profit. How do you really tell how much real traffic and profit a site makes?

It's a mine field, but it's the only mine field around. You can list smaller sites right here in WF in Complete Sites for Sale, but I doubt that you'd get your price for larger sites, or anywhere else for that matter.

I've seen as many as the poster somewhere above fail at this since Flippa moved from Sitepoint and sellers became unhappy with Flippa.

I think number 1 thing would be to set a rule of 5,000 or more, escrow must be used. Under that, paypal. Listing will be free if you have to relist because it didn't sell (one time). Also, requiring statcounter will help because a lot of sellers over there are purchasing a domain running up the clicks in adsense with clicker programs and they're not true clicks, buyer buys and nothing happens, no money. Statcounter would prevent that.
Also, I think I'll have 2 separate divisions, newer sites, older sites, keep it easier to wade through so nobodys eyes bleed. lol including mine.