What caused this site to sell for 5 figures 6 weeks after registration?

**KenW3** · February 1st, 2012, 12:16 AM

I must admit watching this listing with amusement as the bids went into five figures. I don't get it.

Take a new domain name, elecstore.org, and put WordPress on it. Add in a nice eComm theme from ecommerceplex.com and add the products. Make some sales, extrapolate current sales to annual sales, claim six figures in annual sales for a 30-day old site, list it on Flippa, and watch the bidders fight to own it. Six weeks after site is started, collect 22K. Then if he's smart, build other ones according to the same design for the next top five bidders, and collect 18K to 22K from each of them also for 30-day old sites.

Nice video walkthrough and keywords video of rankings was supplied. As the auction started, only one day of PayPal was shown, but more days were added as the auction progressed and more documentation was added. While I could probably fill this page with sarcasm over the listing description, I am astonished at the number of bids, the number of different bidders, and the price paid. I do not understand that level of interest in this site.

**benitez17** · February 1st, 2012, 06:02 AM

I don't get it either. I hope whoever "won" gets cold feet or comes to their senses.

I think Flippa should list sites with annual revenue and profit and forbid extrapolation so people don't get enticed by a month or two of profits.

**rob** · February 1st, 2012, 07:00 AM

Sold at 22 days rev going by what the comments say, assuming they are legit?

**grynge** · February 2nd, 2012, 12:41 AM

Looking through the keywords supplied and then checking the serps I couldn't find the site in question, so my guess would be they use a blackhat technique which looks like real traffic but is in fact just bots.

**crabfoot** · February 3rd, 2012, 10:13 PM

Might be deeper than that.
There's plenty that makes little sense about this site.

Some items on the site have extremely low prices.

If those items appear to be indefinitely out of stock, a lot of customers will buy their second choice alternative item on the same site, assuming that the prices are also correspondingly low (but those other prices are not low).

Alternatively, those low-price items might be old stock/remaindered , refurbished returns, or even counterfeit. They might have fallen off a truck. We have no way of knowing.

The purchaser may have ulterior motives in buying the site - like getting supplier accounts without having to work for them.

All we can do is wait and see.

**Prosperly** · April 10th, 2012, 08:03 PM

The low prices do look suspicious but the traffic is legimate. It is all coming from froogle. I had a good friend that ran a eccommerce site and was showing up on the google shopping results and got a ton of traffic from it. The problem is one day they stopped showing his site and his revenue disappeared over night. Being a new site it is a risky proposition to buy based on only the shopping results.

**Clinton** · April 11th, 2012, 05:09 AM

Hi Adam, Prosperly, nice to see you back. There are people who buy sites like these and there are people who sell sites like these. Maybe it's strange, maybe it's not, but those two circles don't seem to ever intersect. You talk on your blog a great deal about buying and selling websites. Would you buy a site like this?