Have you ever felt like you wasted money on Flippa?

Yes. I tried it once and felt it was very expensive for no benefit. I tried selling an aged website with a decent revenue stream and got no bids.

There are too many listings and not enough buyers IMHO.

I have had a good experience with Flippa BUT in most cases the sites I have sold are making money. If your site is making money and you would rather have a lump sum Flippa works great.

If you just build a site and hope to sell it based on content alone it is a bit of a gamble and you could lose money this way. For instance if I were going to sell a wordpress blog with JUST content I would probably make a $1 auction and hope that it took off.

My point being in most cases your site needs to be making good money to be of interest to someone.

It's pretty discouraging to spend that much money for the bids I get on listings. Here's the way it goes. I list and then come all the assmonkeys who sit around and bid on everything ... $5. They're certain that sooner or later they will accidentally win a really nice site for chump change. If you look at their profiles, you see that they have 50 bids out from 50 sellers and have never won an auction.

They aren't real buyers. They have no intention of bidding an amount over say $30 at most. Flippa is full of them. If your sites have no reserve, you'd be likely to lose your sites to these people for a price that didn't or barely covered your listing expenses.

You have to put some valuable web on flippa to get bids. Aged domains, good information and design and some traffic. those three things are the key to success on flippa.

Luke Skywalker: BUT Uncle Owen, I wanted to buy that flash web site with 1,000 games...
Uncle Owen: Luke, do your chores first, and later you can play on the internet.
Obi-wan Kenobi: FLIPPA, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy!
Han Solo: Chewie, did you add some more BACK LINKS now like I told you?
Chewbacca: ROOOOR!

I bought a few "Service Based" websites
- Article writing service
- Article submission service
- 2 others of which I can't remember now

My sole aim was to reverse engineer their process of selling and then do the same on Flippa. Ultimately what I found was that they were not the best bang for buck investments I have ever made. Although I did tap into a underground network of people who built, sold and marketed these type of websites to people like me etc.

All in all the money spent on what was advertised was no where near worth it! I combined all the sites into 1 site offering all services. I added my own unique marketing spin and started driving traffic to it and tweaked for conversion. Ultimately I made my money back but more important than that was the lessons learned. No amount of money can buy you experience

I made money on Flippa, but it does not happen over night. Many people believe they can cheat the system and show meaningless stats showing small earnings and traffic stats. It takes me about a month before I consider selling a website to flip. This is what I typically do to get a good website sold.
1.) Either buy a website on flippa or build one from scratch, I usually build one from scratch.
2.) Hire two people from Freelancer.com with good background reviews on web design and SEO.
3.) Create a powerful service on the website that brings in residual commissions or one time commissions, but do not make the website strictly for adsense.
4.) Get to a PR1 or 2 on Google to attract buyers to the website.
5.) Get about $2k earnings per month on the website. The more you earn, the higher the bid will be. The bids on my websites are usually 3-4 times the value of the earnings.
6.) Show perfect accurate stats to convince your buyers that you are legit.
7.) Hire your web designer to do the website and domain switch for you because I believe it is a pain in the butt.

So these are simple steps, but it is the quality of the work. Reason why many do not get bids is because they do crappy flips instead of putting a little more work into those websites.

Hope this helps good luck

This thread would have more credibility if you weren't promoting your own marketplace, but still a valid question.

Flippa is full of inexperienced/non-serious buyers which can cause issues. As they have done so much mass-market PR it is natural to attract people who are drawn to the "own your own automated business" myths so the quality is low. However, there are plenty of serious buyers around who have the same issue as serious sellers: there is a lot of rubbish to sift through!

Most sites that get listed on Flippa are either poor quality, scams or over-priced - that's why you won't see every auction getting bids or getting sold. That's the same with any marketplace, I don't think it's specific to Flippa. I don't think there are many ways to avoid it for Flippa as their business is based on mass-market and volume - not targeting experienced buyers and quality sellers (of which there are FAR less).

I never tried flippa. But was eager to try it someday but you are making me afraid of flippa.

People on flippa give very low bid almost every time. This is why I wouldn't suggest to sell your site there. Its always better to contact individual persons / companies if they are interested in buying your site.

It's funny to watch. I listed a site and it sold for the BIN. Turned out to be a non paying bidder though so it is relisted. All week long the site has been getting tiny little bids. Now all of a sudden in the last 1 1/5 hrs, it has 44 bids and is on the most active tab. lol.

It's crazy to see people wait till the last minute to bid on sites. At least their bidding real bids now and I'll make a profit on the site if they are a paying buyer.

Well the positive thing is that the listings for new sites are just $9, so the auction has to end reall low not be making any kind of profit. But then again, it's just not worth it i think to deal with fake bidders = people who never pay you. It can get really frustrating so that's why i stopped selling on flippa...