WebsiteProperties announces marketplace

[Clinton]

rmills, David says it's still in beta, but it looks like he's already attracted some template/turnkey sites!

I look forward to hearing your feedback.

With the marginal extra cost of $6 to list here - and no filtering of sites listed - I can see many of the Flippa template sellers moving over to WP to try and capture some of the (perceived) better buyers. That seems to me the best way of quickly becoming a Flippa clone without the Flippa facilities, features and large reach.

I do like the fact that he discloses the day each listing was created. That's what really bugs me about some of the businessforsale sites - you've no idea how long the business has been sitting on their shelves waiting for a buyer.

[benitez17]

With the marginal extra cost of $6 to list here - and no filtering of sites listed - I can see many of the Flippa template sellers moving over to WP to try and capture some of the (perceived) better buyers. That seems to me the best way of quickly becoming a Flippa clone without the Flippa facilities, features and large reach.

Is that what David is going for? If his marketplace is flooded with Flippa turnkey crap and there is no way for me to avoid looking at it, I won't be visiting the marketplace often.

[petertdavis]

Kudos to him for giving this a try, but in the end I'm not going to give a rat's patutie about it until there are some listings of websites that I'd actually consider buying on there. So far, all I see is over-priced hyped up garbage.

[Clinton]

Update: The websiteproperties marketplace seems to be picking up some traction, however slowly.

My observations so far

1. Sellers have the option of disclosing their URL. Some do and for those that don't the URL provided in the listing (and, strangely, the WHOIS link provided) all relate to the websiteproperties domain itself.

For sellers who don't want to disclose their site - and, let's face it, there are always a few - websiteproperties seems to be the only option apart from the big business listing sites such as businessesforsale.com and bizquest. Flippa doesn't allow such annonymous listings.

2. I doubt there is any checking of figures and financials - it's a Flippa type free-for-all where a seller can claim any rubbish and get away with it. This is not a bad thing per se, as it's up to the buyer to do the DD, but maybe management is doing some basic filtering to avoid the place becoming like DP. This listing claims a "cashflow" of $300K and a net profit of $25K. It would be interesting to see their detailed figures.

3. Sellers can list what's included in the deal. Some options: Business Entity, Website Program Code, Trade Names and Trade Marks, Original Graphics and Content, 3rd Party Licences, Product Inventory, Customer Lists, Supplier/Vendor Agreements and, huh, Domain Name

If the domain name is optional the idea may be to allow sale of scripts, Squidoo lenses, other UGC pages and, possibly, identities (in social networks, forums, Twitter)

4. You need to disclose your details if you want to contact the seller. You need to provide to websiteproperties your full name, email address and phone number.

5. Sorting: There's some basic sorting facility. You can sort by domain + website, website only (?!) or domain only (I notice links.com is up there now). You can also sort by date, price, location and title.... and if you use the search feature in the right column, by industry and category. But there aren't that many listings at the moment to properly test all the search functionality. I don't know what the "website only" listing is about but people who've opted for that seem to be offering domains as well as the site.

6. Prices: There are some very "ambitious" prices from sellers and that may account for why some of those listings have been around there since September. But well done to websiteproperties for disclosing the date of listing. This is an omission at places like businessesforsale that always annoyed me. If a business hasn't been bought for a long time that rings alarm bells in itself and I want to hear those bells.

Incidentally, there are a lot of properties all listed on the 16th of September last year. I wonder where that list was imported from ... the properties already on their books? If so then the date of listing is not reliable and these could have been around for years!

7. There's seems to be no way of telling how successful the marketplace is for selling sites. Stats like average time to sale, selling prices, number of sales per month etc would be useful and serve to attract more listings. I'd like to see a page with a list of all sites sold in the last week/month/year.

What do you think of this marketplace shaping up and the progress they've made?

[richrf]

I decided to try it out for selling my premium domain. The reason I like it is that: 1) There are many other high quality premium domains on the market, 2) my name gets excellent visibility and lots of new eyeballs because it is not competing with thousands of others non-premium domains 3) the price/click is good when compared to Google Adsense 4) they have reasonably good SERP for premium domain names keywords so they are attracting new visitors.

The biggest bump in visits was when they sent out their newsletter informing their list of new properties. Since then there are a few new visitors each day. My listing is for two months and I may or may not renew after this time frame, but it certainly has been a very reasonable vehicle for publicizing the availability of my new premium domain. In fact, besides my initial press release, which was phenomenal, this site has given me the highest visibility. During the initial phase of selling my domain, visibility and word-of-mouth, I feel, is very important.

[Clinton]

websiteproperties seem to have revived their Flippa account (websitebroker1) and are listing some of their properties in Flippa now.

In my previous post from a year ago I said that they seemed to be picking up some traction, but I'm not sure if they held on to that. What do you think?

They seem to have listed five new sites in Jan, five in Feb and two this month. Anyone here visiting them regularly?

[richrf]

Hi Clinton,

I think that Flippa has become the go-to-place for selling web businesses and websiteproperties simply does not provide comparable visibility and bidding apparatus. It is a nicely done site, but I don't remember receiving any leads though the site. I used them once and did get some visibility but I didn't feel there was any reason to go back.

It will be interesting to see how the bidding on my site ends up on Flippa but it is easily the best place right now for me to get some action.

[Clinton]

Another broker who has a site listed at websiteproperties claims that he's received an email that suggests websiteproperties is closing their marketplace.

Anybody has any news or this? Or, if you have a site listed at websiteproperties, did you get an email along those lines?