Thanks to Flippa, you can now negotiate on web site listings

[benitez17]

The Flippa blog has been bought back from the dead with this post explaining that you can now negotiate a with buyers if a site does not sell due to a reserve that was not met during the auction. If only someone had thought of this previously!

Seriously, why would anyone use this? Once the auction is over, the requirement to give Flippa a cut of the sales price is gone, so buyers and sellers would be much better off negotiating via email or Skype or any of the other methods that were available before Flippa created this tool to try and hold on to a little more revenue.

I do like Andrew's little jab at sellers who have an unrealistic reserve price.

[Clinton]

Thanks, benitez17, good points.

But kudos to Flippa for coming up with a way of increasing their earnings (and encouraging dialogue between buyers and sellers).

Just a couple of weeks ago I sold one of the sites I listed in my BSTE thread. The max bid it got at Flippa was $80K and I wasn't willing to sell at that price, I needed a bit more. After some private negotiation (via email) I sold it for a price that we were both happy with - I got more money and the buyer got what he wanted.

If I had used Flippa's in-house negotiation that would have costed me an extra $500 in Flippa's success fees! Nobody in the Flippa comments spotted the fact that this is a good way to make less money

It's a good thing that savvy buyers and sellers are members here and read threads like this

I do like Andrew's little jab at sellers who have an unrealistic reserve price.

Unrealistic reserve price is what I've been advising people to do for ages! It allows people to test the market - for a $19 listing fee - to see how much their site is worth without having to sell. It's also a good way of avoiding the success fees for quality sites. You simply wait till the bidding is complete and then enter into private negotiations with all the top bidders. Win-win (well, win-win for buyers and sellers anyway).

[benitez17]

But kudos to Flippa for coming up with a way of increasing their earnings (and encouraging dialogue between buyers and sellers).

I don't fault them at all for trying to capture some revenue that would otherwise be lost, I just found the tone of the post to be funny.

Just a couple of weeks ago I sold one of the sites I listed in my BSTE thread. The max bid it got at Flippa was $80K and I wasn't willing to sell at that price, I needed a bit more. After some private negotiation (via email) I sold it for a price that we were both happy with - I got more money and the buyer got what he wanted.

If I had used Flippa's in-house negotiation that would have costed me an extra $500 in Flippa's success fees! Nobody in the Flippa comments spotted the fact that this is a good way to make less money

It's a good thing that savvy buyers and sellers are members here and read threads like this

I debated pointing this out at the Flippa blog post. I don't have time right now, but I may post later and see what their response is. $500 isn't much in your case, but at their average selling price, the 5% does matter.

Unrealistic reserve price is what I've been advising people to do for ages! It allows people to test the market - for a $19 listing fee - to see how much their site is worth without having to sell. It's also a good way of avoiding the success fees for quality sites. You simply wait till the bidding is complete and then enter into private negotiations with all the top bidders. Win-win (well, win-win for buyers and sellers anyway).

I agree (and have used that method plenty of times myself), but I don't think most sellers with high reserves are that savvy.

[Clinton]

I debated asking this question at the Flippa blog. I don't have time right now, but I may post later and see what their response is.

You sure you want to share this with the world?

[benitez17]

You sure you want to share this with the world?

Why not? I would like to confirm that they still plan to collect the full success fee.

[Clinton]

I hope they pleasantly surprise us and their reply shows that this not all just designed to collect more money.

Thinking about it a bit more though, you'd need to be pretty stupid to do your post sale negotiation via PM. For this to work, Flippa needs not just a dumb seller who doesn't know how to use emails, but two parties using Flippa PMs instead of emails!

Even if you're aren't looking to do Flippa out of their success fees, why on earth would you have private conversations in a place where the staff snoop on what you're saying?

[benitez17]

I hope they pleasantly surprise us and their reply shows that this not all just designed to collect more money.

Thinking about it a bit more though, you'd need to be pretty stupid to do your post sale negotiation via PM. For this to work, Flippa needs not just a dumb seller who doesn't know how to use emails, but two parties using Flippa PMs instead of emails!

Even if you're aren't looking to do Flippa out of their success fees, why on earth would you have private conversations in a place where the staff snoop on what you're saying?

Because they have managed to convince a lot of people that doing business through them is safe?

God knows why, but people seem to believe that their abysmal support and "due dilligence" are worth something, and that their proven ability to snoop is a non-issue.

[Andrew]

Benitez17, No secret that online marketplaces of all kinds (not just for websites) unfortunately attract bogus as well as legitimate participants. Flippa spends an incredible amount of time weeding out the latter through both technical/automated enhancements as well as manual review by our support team.

While this may be considered snooping by some, it goes a long way in identifying fraud related activity such as bogus listings/bids, shill bidding, comment/IM spamming (yes, still a bit of work to do here) etc.

While nobody is able to offer a 100% safe marketplace, I like to think that we raise the bar for safe website trading marketplaces. Let us know if you feel there is anyone outdoing us in this regard ...

[Clinton]

Andrew, having just listed two sites myself, I do accept that you've put several systems in place to thwart some of the scamming activity. For example, I had to verify that I owned the domains. This is a checking system that would have taken a fair bit of implementation at your end.

I don't believe people like benitez17 have an issue with measures like that. But would you agree that IM snooping - the kind that forum owners like us don't have/want - has the potential to give Flippa staff (and the odd hacker) considerable competitive advantage?

I can, however, see how accessing IMs can tip you off about any negotiations between buyer and seller to circumvent paying you the success fees.

[benitez17]

Benitez17, No secret that online marketplaces of all kinds (not just for websites) unfortunately attract bogus as well as legitimate participants. Flippa spends an incredible amount of time weeding out the latter through both technical/automated enhancements as well as manual review by our support team.

While this may be considered snooping by some, it goes a long way in identifying fraud related activity such as bogus listings/bids, shill bidding, comment/IM spamming (yes, still a bit of work to do here) etc.

While nobody is able to offer a 100% safe marketplace, I like to think that we raise the bar for safe website trading marketplaces. Let us know if you feel there is anyone outdoing us in this regard ...

Andrew, when I referred to snooping, I was talking about the ability that Flippa admins have to view private PMs between users, not things like URL verification and automated data collection.

I'd feel a lot more comfortable buying a site from websiteproperties.com or another similar website broker because someone has actually reviewed the listings for obvious flaws and scams. Flippa is better than the DigitalPoint forum when it comes to scams, but DP doesn't have posts from shills like Ed Dale trying to convince newbies that there is no chance of being scammed on Flippa, and therefore no need to worry about it, which is just setting them up to be ripped off.

Also, claims that clearly are not true (like that 55% of sites listed through Flippa are sold, when in reality 55% of listings have a winning bidder, and some percentage of those buyers don't follow through with the purchase) don't help engender trust.