Stop! Flippa Police - Flippa Police!

I don't approve salespage lies but creating a hype is purely marketing.

All the data is presented and all flippa members are advised not to get into the "this website makes $7000 a day with 10 minutes of work and BIN is set to $2000".

Buyers are becoming cautious but there are still (I've seen them) many sales escalated due to marketing and creating a hype.

Flippa is a pretty disappointing marketplace, in my view. Lots of hyped, crap product. Not a lot integrity.

How many people are really interested in selling a profitable website? It's the easiest business in the world to run.

I always see in the recently sold list. A site that went for a lot of money and the user who sold it what happened to him ? Banned. Always be careful what you buy in the internet.

According to me its totally a MISTAKE of a BUYER who buys such site's and we should not BLAME FLIPPA because FLIPPA is just a platform which connects buyers and sellers ....

FACT: I agree that a newbie will easily to a trap by watching such a beautiful website which claims to make $10K a month with NO WORK !

If a SELLER claims- No Traffic, No Sales, No revenue, Etc..... Then SELLER is 100% correct at his place !

It depends on the BUYER who buys it ! Running a website will totally depend on the buyer how he manages everything and make money from it....

Regards
~Sam~

This is standard crap for Flippa ... it is so full of scam sellers and scam buyers that it's really risky doing business there, particularly if you are new and inexperienced.

You really need a lot of common sense and know what to look for and what questions to ask before buying.

As for scam buyers who get the site and then do Paypal chargebacks ... there's very little due diligence you can do about that. Safest bet is to use escrow.

I use flippa for over a year, and I didn't had any problems until now. The buyer should always verify what the seller says, by asking him to post a proof of what he claims. I he wont do that, it means he tries to scam you.

I really don't know what buyer think before bidding, some website are really not worth it and the revenue are not making sense but hitting $$$$ while other may make sense and has a decent listing but people wouldn't go for it probably because it is a business require work and everyone want to jump on the magic passive money maker.

If the crap didn't exist then everyone would find the gems and pick them up.

I agree that it's terrible what some people try and sell on flippa these days, but there will always be people trying to make a quick buck. Luckily, I've noticed a lot of the time these straight-up scams don't get a single bid.

Great points you make Lilblackdress. Having created and sold web-businesses all my life, witnessing what happens on Flippa makes me cringe. People are literally 'flipping junk' and low and behold there are buyers for it.

The concept of "due diligence" for the most part has been throw out the window. In fact vast majority of buyers wouldn't even know where to begin to perform real due diligence on a given proposal. I remember a few years back when I sold one of my web projects, the buyer who paid multiple six figures for that business, flew over, we went through my bank statement, merchant account statements, the real P/L numbers and whole lot more. My suppliers became the new buyers' suppliers etc etc. As a seller, I had a real checklist that I worked on before inviting the buyer over to do his due diligence. I knew I was selling a business with a solid foundation, had nothing to hide and once the money was in the bank I had nothing to worry about. The buyer was smart and took the same business to a multi-million dollar operation which he later sold to a venture capital firm. No body does that kind of 'real' due diligence any more.

Most sellers on flippa aren't selling real businesses. They are selling half-baked, many times fantasticoed and hastily put together web scripts (sometimes half operational and nulled) to dreamers, who drowned in the daze of their dreams, throw away the money. In this age when photoshop is on every computer and get-rich-quick enthusiasts are aplenty, everything is possible. Many many times I have felt that there is a serious void that exists and a real business opportunity available in just doing due diligence for Flippa buyers (you do have to know what you are doing though). I am happily busy with what I am doing, but I hope Flippa can play a more effective role in safeguarding the foolish (but good-hearted) dreamers I mentioned above.

Anyway, you bring up some good points and I appreciate you touching upon this topic.

Sellers, please be more responsible when selling, and buyers, please be A LOT MORE responsible when investing your hard-earned dollars.

Even the legitimate looking sites on Flippa are usually scammy in some way shape or form.

Why do you think the owner is trying to sell? Do you really believe that they are "ready to move onto the next thing?" More likely it's one of the following:
- Their rankings just dropped and they are trying to sell the site before anyone notices and it's value goes down.
- Last month they had a far higher CPM in adsense than usual, and Adsense earnings are starting to drop back to normal. Why hold onto a $15/day site, when you randomly have one $30/day month and you can sell it as if it has always made $30/day!
- The ranks the site with tons of low quality backlinks, knowing full well that in a month or two Google will catch on and the rankings will drop.
- They ranked a site using sitewide links, and as soon as they sell the site they will switch all of the sitewides to a new site that they'll sell a couple months later (and repeat the process).
- They sell physical products and their dropshipper told them that they were closing business in a month.
- They just got banned from the affiliate offer they were promoting (or their Adsense account got banned for ToS violations).

I'd never buy a site on Flippa unless it was in an industry I'm familiar with. I've made one and only one purchase on Flippa, and it was a site that I knew about before it was listed on Flippa. I had talked to the owner several years earlier (in fact at that time, I even got the traffic stats from the owner so I was able to compare traffic now versus traffic several years earlier). It was in an industry I was familiar with, and I knew customers of the service.

You can never do enough due dilligence with Flippa; you always have to be careful because in nearly every auction somebody is trying to screw you over.

Unfortunatly my friend people will always take advantage of other people and this is what flipper is all about in my opinion. I have visited this site on numerous occassions and each time I have been swamped with sellers trying to catch a newby who doesn't understand web development and online businesses. I remember one seller that stuck out like a swore thumb once who was selling a wordpress template that had a premium plugin installed on it and this seller was promoting the website as a unique business oppertunity because of the bespoke setup. He was charging a small fortune for it.
Most sellers on flipper just take advantage of other peoples lack of knowledge. IMO its a morally bankrupt marketplace. Its a shame because I know there are a few genuine and honest sellers on there and the flipper site owners should see the potential they have if they just manage it properly.

The massive trend of wanting to make serious money online and fast is directly responsible for creating people who have no problem scamming others. It is also directly responsible for creating the people who fall victim to these scams. I personally blame a lot of the IM gurus who all like to promise big pay checks for very little work.

Untill everyone realises that there is no such thing as a get rich quick idea on the internet these problems will just continue and probably get worse in times of financial hardship. Anyone who wants to make money on the internet needs to put the time, effort, and work into it before they should even hope of making their first buck. Online money making IS a full time job.

Wow, very interesting info here. Thanks for sharing

You know what I'd love to see? A couple of examples of sites for sale at Flippa that seasoned Warriors, such as sbucciarel, would recommend buying, as well as an explanation of why and a maximum price suggestion. To help us understand what to look for.

Hi,

I concur with LilBlackDress. I now have the 'luxury of past experience' to see where potential buyers on Flippa could go very wrong. Unfortunately, I have make a couple rather large mistakes on Flippa using 'emotional reasoning' as my means of gathering evidence and making a decision to buy or not to buy. What I mean is being captured by the copy and 'convincing myself' that what I am reading is true and objective. Despite there being good sites on there (which tend to be of course rather expensive), there are also ones that are simply 'too good to be true'! Remember that short saying as this + monitoring of our tendency to buy with emotion - thereby bypassing reason, is a recipe for disaster!

cheers, Patrick

I once tried to sell a site there with no hype, only honest and solid facts. Very poor bids.

I haven't been there in a while but the last time I sold a site I made sure that the buyer had a good rep. (well established). In the case of the newbie getting ripped off - it is sad. Just like with Ebay, you can avoid a lot of headaches if you just deal with those that have done a lot of business there and have a VERY high rating and great feedback.

Don't let the issues at Flippa deter you from using the site... there are some real gems to be found...

Dig.

I have seen some WSO which talk about creating service web site like Selling backlinks, FB likes etc and sell the site in flippa. Most of these site sellers get these services from fiverr and sell same service for a big amount in new sites. This is the game!

This is why I don't buy from Flippa, I only sell

I think Flippa can be viewed as a specific IM platform these days....and the same Buyer Beware holds there too.

It's the marketers' job to make something look so yummy only fossilized clams would ignore it.

It's the consumer's job to ensure all due research has been completed.

Sad to say, but the responsibility, I feel, lies more so with the buyer. So many people are looking for that silver bullet that doesn't exist; they need to teach themselves how NOT to be scammed.

Buyers are becoming cautious. There are plenty of sales that look spams. Its better not to buy from flippa.

I've always wondered if there is a reputable alternative to Flippa?

Guys and girls, I think you are wrong with your comments... maybe some sellers on Flippa sells crappy sites or they over-hyped their descriptions, but that doesn't mean Flippa is bad for business, selling websites, buying them or simply flipping them...

Internet is full of scammers on every part of it and in every industry... if you are a buyer, you have to be careful, no matter what you are buying online... if you are seller, try to be honest with your buyers... if you are just a visitors, take notes and remember for future to be careful as possible... just don't blame some service or platform because there is scam and fraud over there... that's the case on all similar services and platforms...

Even more, is Warrior forum crappy place just because most of the WSO are simply crap and sellers are squeezing money from Warriors by selling hype and not the actual product that will help someone? I can't agree with that... I'm seeing a lot of crappy and fraudulent WSOs, especially in the latest time, even from "trusted" Warriors... is that Warrior forum's fault? The Warrior forum is just a platform.... sellers are those who are responsible for their actions and products, and buyers are those who should be careful... it's the same situation there of Flippa ... people want to sell their websites and make as much money as they can, although I can approve lies and over-hype ... but if there are such a websites offered, that still doesn't mean Flippa is bad for business or that you can't buy a good website on Flippa...

Think a little before you comment anything... if we would go rate services on the Internet following such a comments and thoughts, it would be better for you to turn off your PC and never surf the web again because there are frauds, lies and lot of hype everywhere around you...

Going by the ops reasoning for not using Flippa, maybe we should all leave the warrior forum, as quite a few people get scammed on here as well!

I currently sell sites on Flippa and they all sell, the last few i have sold for the bin price of $147 for a new site with no traffic, no earnings and no hype. Just a great domain, subject & site.

And to the people that say why would people sell money making sites unless they were scamming then that is rubbish, i have sold quite a few of my adsense money making sites purely because i had about 50 sites and didn't have the time to maintain them all, but they were still making good adsense income when i sold them.

I have also bought a site from Flippa in the past that cost me $1k but it make $3k in 2 months.

So not everyone is a con artist on there and and not every auction is a con, it is like anything else you need to know what you are doing on there to not get ripped off.

There are a lot of good points here in this thread, one of the problems as I see it is that apparently this website does not have a strict policy in place to protect the buyer, this could become a real problem in the future. Perhaps in the very near future, I have seen, like other posters here, sham websites posted that claim income that would shame the devil, but seriously, there are websites with copyrighted names in the domain names for sale, (there is no excuse for allowing that kind of website in the marketplace at all) Imagine paying $3,500.00 for a income producing website, with a copyrighted term in the domain name and in a month you might get a cease and desist letter, telling you that you are being sued for copyright violations and Squatting on a trade mark,

serious issues, yet it seems like there are so many buyers waiting to jump on those deals, it is good to see a thread like this to at least warn some buyers that they might be paying a high price for what really is worth nothing because it is stolen from a trade mark owner.

That is what this is, you can see trade marks and copyrighted domain names being sold, and that is not legal, it is evil to watch people buying this kind of stuff knowing that this website allows this is disturbing and it is something that may be of interest to some agencies in the near future.

A lot of people think that the Internet is still like the wild wild west where any thing goes that is about to change soon...