I'm interested in buying a profitable website but need advice

I'll leave this for the much more experienced Warriors, but one thing I would never do is to mark payment as a gift! You might want to ask him why he wants the marking as such as there is no reason for it, only bad motives on his end.

The thing about sending payments as a gift is, that its very hard to get that money back. So if you send money to someone as gift, and you dont receive your goods, you will have hard times getting that money back. After all a gift is a gift.

Tell them to list it on flippa and make it a private sell....that way you are protected

@social media owls. Good idea. I'll see if they are willing to do that.

As far as sending it as a gift. I advised to him that I wouldn't do it that way because I have no protection in case he doesn't deliver and he said he had no idea. I asked him why he wanted me to send it that way. Only thing I could think is that it doesn't cost him fees when I send him the money as a gift. Since its a fairly large sum of money the fees cut into the profit a bit.

I'm wondering about any other red flags to watch for?

Ask the buyers to give you access to their Google Analytics.

All they have to do is add your Gmail account as a "user" in their Google Analytics settings in the manager section. It's perfectly safe. The only thing that "user" can do is log in and look.

Also, there is this program call teamviewer. You and the sellers should download it. What it does it, enable you the view their computer screen live as they log in to their account. This way, you can dictate them what you want to see so you can verify revenue or anything you want. Again, it's perfectly safe.

It's next to impossible to fake these two things I mention. So, if the sellers are not willing to do these, I would get very suspicious if I were you.

Thanks Dash! I never even thought about asking if them if they have google analytics installed. I was just looking at the traffic from compete.

OMG ... a gift. Good one. Scammer for certain.

Use escrow.com. They are the middleman that protects both you and the seller.

Here's a thread that gives some more tips for not getting ripped off.
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ipped-off.html

@loyaltytoday: Ask him to do a live video feed where you can watch in real-time how he will login into his paypal account and show you all the statements one by one along with everything else you want to see, that way you will make sure that he is not faking the statements, etc. If he is a legit seller, he should not have any problems agreeing to your request because he will have nothing to hide and you will not see his passwords, etc., because they will be under asterisks anyway!

If the person is making money everyday, or even better every hour, another trick I used is to ask to chat with them, than once they are chatting with you, tell them to send you a screen shot with earnings for the past few hours... since he is not prepared for such a question and will not have time to photoshop the earnings, if he will send it to you in the next few minutes it probably means that he is legit, if he starts making excuses, etc., it probably means he doesn't have time to photoshop them and is BS'ing you...

Let me know how it goes and good luck!

Avoid Paypal for larger transactions altogether. Use escrow.com as suggested by others. If his earnings are from adsense, affiliate programs, ask for access to his accounts. There is no risk in him/her giving you access. You can't really steal their account. I know, there will be difference of opinion here.

Get the seller's phone number, use skype and call him/her. You get a feel for the person.

Finally, follow your guts.

Escow.com is pretty much foolproof if you are buying a domain/site.

Don't try to save a couple bucks now and then be left out in the cold...

Thanks everyone! I had no idea about escrow.com and I've gone through every flippa site I can possibly find and can't find one that generates the kind of income I'm looking for or the niche I want to enter or is within my price range! I'll keep looking and now I have at least have some more knowledge on what to look for. It's like buying a car. If you don't have a mechanic look at it under the hood you could be buying a lemon. This is the only place I could think of that would have experts that know what to look for. or "website mechanics" lol I know how to build my own I just don't know how to buy one from someone else.

Many of the true scammers are pretty obvious to spot, but some of the sellers that might be just a little less ethical can pull some tricks that are hard to catch. I don't have the most experience buying websites, but I know as a seller some of the things you CAN use to not be as up-front with buyers as they'd like you to be.

Probably the best tip I can give you is that you shouldn't do business with anyone on Flippa or elsewhere that hides behind anonymity. There's a chance they "might" be legitimate, but more often than not there's something fishy. Have their LinkedIn, other websites, forum handles or other places they "hang out" online, phone number, etc. Google search their full name in quotes and add the word "scam" or "sucks".

Well all the things I was going to suggest have been posted and they are use escrow, Flippa and get them to make an analytics login for you. good luck with it, let us know. Also, don't rush into it,take your time, better to research and pick up some knowledge, I would spend weeks browsing flippa until you get some experience in this.

edit: if you have little experience I would suggest hiring an expert to help, I'm sure there are people who specialize in this if you search online!

edit again, I see sbucciarel might be a good person to speak to....

Depending on the value of the purchase.

Less than $500 - use a private sale on Flippa
Over $500 always use an escrow service such as Escrow.com (I use them frequently for high value transactions both as a buyer and seller and have been impressed).

I wanted to buy a website once, looked really well and made good money on AdSense. It was $2000. I was really excited. Then, I asked my friend to check it out, since he knows more about flipping websiotes. He said it's Ok but what he would like to see is a video of this guy loging into his AdSense account. For someone who is going to cash in it shouldnt be a problem to make a short video like this.
The guy didn't do it, I didn't buy it. Later it turned out it was a scam. It wa son Flippa. So be careful!!!! Definitely ask for videos, nowadays that's the best way to avoid scammers.
Hope it helps.

Well, you definitely will have to use Escrow services to stay on the safe side.

Like what everyone else is saying, ditch paypal for the transaction. Use an escrow service like escrow.com for your own protection.

Yeah, the gifting thing on paypal is a scam. Been burned by that before, fortunately, it was only $120 (paying a new service provider in advance - he requested me to declare it as a gift so that we can circumvent paypal fees and taxes).