FP - Affiliate sites Vs Ecommerce sites

[Jacob Anthony]

Hi guys,

I've been looking into this site flipping business and am looking at what type of site to concentrate on working on. I therefore have come up with a question that may be a bit of a noob question so please bear with me on this one!

I have experience in building blogs and ecommerce sites.

Now I know that both can bring in equal incomes but are monetised in different ways. Blogs earn money by earning commission for referring their readers to other websites where as ecommerce sites earn their money by getting the customer to buy the product they are looking for on that same site, therefore the customer "belongs" to that site.

Does this customer retention make a difference in the inherent value of an ecommerce site, or is the value of a site purely based on its domain age, traffic and revenue generated, regardless of what type of site it is.

Thanks for your time in reading this!

Jacob

[BrettM]

Hi Jacob!

My answer to your question is "all" . Some people will buy sites solely based on age and / or PR. In fact some people would steer away from ecommerce sites as the unknown of the work (how much time? how to fill orders? how to contact suppliers? etc.).

Others would only by ecommerce sites as they see them as second nature and know all the ins-and-outs of of the questions above, but may never touch age / PR sites as that may seem too speculative to them.

My advice is know the market to buy & sell, so if you find a great age site, you know where to offload it for profit. Similar if you find a ecommerce site, again you can offload it for profit.

Just check out a number of auctions on Flippa and you'll see everyone is buying anything -- one man's junk is another's treasure .

Hope that helps.

[flipfilter]

Hi Jacob,

I think the pro and cons of both balance out, and a big part depends on the buyer.

Some people prefer the passive nature of affiliate sites rather than ecommerce which tends to involve a higher level of customer service. Find the right product however and ecommerce will generally mean less visitors to make more money so from an SEO perspective, it's probably easier to operate.