In how many ways is Flippa skewed towards the crap end of the market?

[Clinton]

We know they are skewed towards the crap end of the market. What says crap end to you?

My go

1. The name:

Flippa is cheap, tacky, down market and suggestive of quick site-flipping / quick profits rather than a market for established businesses.

2. Feedback:

As I've posted elsewhere, for the big deals it is almost impossible that everything happens within the 30 day window for feedback. Even if due diligence + transfer of funds + transfer of domain + transfer of site all work smoothly and nothing hits a snag (yeah, right! I've never had a single big purchase go 100% smoothly) ... there is usually a support period built into the contract and it would be premature to leave feedback before that period is up.

To tie the feedback to a 30 day window suggests that Flippa doesn't have the experience of how the larger transactions work or they expect that eventually the larger transaction will go elsewhere.

[hooperman]

3. Using a blog to promote the Flippa is fine, but the posts are written by someone relatively inexperienced and are aimed at newbs. The goal of the posts seems to be to encourage fledgeling buyers to dwell at the low end of the market. The website buying case study, for example, featured the purchase of a young site that was making no money.

[LukeMoulton]

1. A brand develops it's own entity after a time - who would have thought Virgin would become a massive respected business.

2. I you think extending the listing time would benefit buyers and seller, happy to consider it.

3. IMO, the best place for newbies to get a feel for the marketplace, get some experience and learn about buying & selling websites is at the lower end. If you don't have a couple of $100 to spend on educating yourself in the marketplace then you're not serious about trading.

[benitez17]

4. Flippa's refusal to proactively moderate or review listings means that there is little risk to a scammer who provides false data, and those crap listings clutter the marketplace and drown out the actual quality sites.

Luke, on point 3, don't you think that the best way for newbies to learn is to either: do everything on their own to gain some experience, or buy a site with an established method to generate traffic or revenue that the seller will explain to the newbie buyer when the site is transferred. Alternatively, they could get a turnkey site with no traffic or revenue at someplace like DP or eBay for $20 rather than the $100+ that people attempt to charge at Flippa, and spend the difference on advertising tests, a course from a tutor, or a book. I agree that someone shouldn't jump in and buy a site for $10,000 as a test run, but I don't think that wasting money in your marketplace counts as education.

[tke71709]

1. A brand develops it's own entity after a time - who would have thought Virgin would become a massive respected business.

But you're not developing an identity/entity you're trying to recover from the fiasco that occurred when you launched Flippa.

You'll recover, it's just a matter of time if you don't ever ever ever let Dave Slutzkin speak in public again.

[LukeMoulton]

Luke, on point 3, don't you think that the best way for newbies to learn is to either: do everything on their own to gain some experience, or buy a site with an established method to generate traffic or revenue that the seller will explain to the newbie buyer when the site is transferred. Alternatively, they could get a turnkey site with no traffic or revenue at someplace like DP or eBay for $20 rather than the $100+ that people attempt to charge at Flippa, and spend the difference on advertising tests, a course from a tutor, or a book. I agree that someone shouldn't jump in and buy a site for $10,000 as a test run, but I don't think that wasting money in your marketplace counts as education.

I think there's still some value in the lower end of the marketplace and that new buyers can be taught to find value in low-end sites. Teaching buyers to look for value indicators, even in the low end of the market, will hopefully mean in the long term that crappy sites don't get sold and sellers realize it's not worth listing poor quality.

Personally, I'm more than happy to pay $200 for a site that:

• Is developed on a popular & easy to manage platform (eg Wordpress)
• Has a keyword rich domain
• Focuses on a niche that isn't oversubscribed
• Has a good amount of unique content.
• Has some backlinks

For me to do the keyword research, find a niche, setup a Wordpress site, install and customize a theme, and write (or spend $100 on) 10 original articles, might take me 1 day (if I'm lucky). I'm happy to spend $200 - $300 on a well built niche site if it meets the above criteria because I'm time poor and impatient.

[benitez17]

I think there's still some value in the lower end of the marketplace and that new buyers can be taught to find value in low-end sites. Teaching buyers to look for value indicators, even in the low end of the market, will hopefully mean in the long term that crappy sites don't get sold and sellers realize it's not worth listing poor quality.

Fair enough. I don't agree, because these turnkey sites are missing the key ingredient (revenue) that makes a site successful, and a new buyer isn't going to have a clue about how to begin generating revenue, but I don't think we are going to change our opinions on this one.

Personally, I'm more than happy to pay $200 for a site that:

• Is developed on a popular & easy to manage platform (eg Wordpress)
• Has a keyword rich domain
• Focuses on a niche that isn't oversubscribed
• Has a good amount of unique content.
• Has some backlinks

For me to do the keyword research, find a niche, setup a Wordpress site, install and customize a theme, and write (or spend $100 on) 10 original articles, might take me 1 day (if I'm lucky). I'm happy to spend $200 - $300 on a well built niche site if it meets the above criteria because I'm time poor and impatient.

Here is where I have an issue. What can they do with this site that they couldn't do with a site that they bought at eBay for $20 instead of your $200 site from Flippa? Why not pay overpay at DP and get a great site for $50, and then buy another 15 articles at your $10 rate, or buy some tutoring, or something else useful?

I think you would be better off writing blog posts that highlight success stories from people who bought sites at SP/Flippa, rather than trying to force people to see the almost infinite supply of turnkey sites that are overpriced compared to other marketplaces as a great business opportunity.

For example, if you found someone who bought a site at Flippa 6 months ago, worked to add quality content, used a number of methods to increase traffic, got the site into higher end ad networks, and the result of this work is that a site that was making $100 per month is now making $500 per month, a report from them would probably be a lot more effective than your posts claiming that everyone should to dive in and spend some money at Flippa today on one of the hundreds of indistinguishable sites for sale with no real hope for success.

And to attempt to make this post slightly on topic, if you promote success stories instead of turnkey sites, people will look for sites similar to the one in your posts (which probably wasn't a crap listing), and the overall marketplace will improve.

[hooperman]

1. A brand develops it's own entity after a time - who would have thought Virgin would become a massive respected business.

2. I you think extending the listing time would benefit buyers and seller, happy to consider it.

3. IMO, the best place for newbies to get a feel for the marketplace, get some experience and learn about buying & selling websites is at the lower end. If you don't have a couple of $100 to spend on educating yourself in the marketplace then you're not serious about trading.

I think you misunderstood the initial question. These 3 points don't address "In how many ways is Flippa skewed towards the crap end of the market?".

[Clinton]

Luke, extending the listing time is not the answer to anything, I don't think. The larger deals take longer to complete. In fact, negotiations and DD could go on for months! You have to limit time for feedback, but transactions like these end up not getting any feedback. So sellers/buyers of the best quality sites may end up getting zero feedback and therefore defeating the purpose of your "reputation" scoring.

IMO, the best place for newbies to get a feel for the marketplace, get some experience and learn about buying & selling websites is at the lower end.

I agree with you. People have to enter somewhere. And I strongly urge them to play around with buying sites, but only with money they can afford to lose.

If you don't have a couple of $100 to spend on educating yourself in the marketplace then you're not serious about trading.

Now that I have serious reservations about. Enough of a budget "to be a Flippa customer" isn't what people should use to decide whether they should play. Time, dedication, talent, contacts, attitude and other factors should determine that. Money isn't the sole or even the first requirement for getting an education. And Flippa isn't the only place. Sorry!

I wouldn't dismiss someone just because he doesn't have $200 he can take a risk with. Examples abound of entrepreneurs who've made it big by investing less than the registration cost of a domain name! I know for a fact our member roshan started his site with almost nothing and sold it for several thousand dollars.

You'll recover, it's just a matter of time if you don't ever ever ever let Dave Slutzkin speak in public again.

Don't say that! I'm hoping Dave will join us! And Matt. Open house. The more the merrier.

benetiz17's assertion is that there is extra value to a Flippa $200 site than what can be picked up elsewhere for $20 or $50. This may or may not be true. I haven't done the detailed comparisons to say whether eBay templates offer better value than Flippa ones. Has anyone else?

I do like the idea of Flippa success stories. However, we need to be cautious about who's writing them. We've had cases in the past of full-time site-flippers talking up the market enthusiastically (and deviously) just to get more buyers jumping in. What may be a better guage is the seller record. Template sellers come and go. Enthused by talk elsewhere of money to be made in site-flipping, they get all evangelical about it and launch into creating templates in various niches and flogging them off to wannabe entrepreneurs. Most soon find it doesn't work and they give up and move on (in fact, many of them are selling their site flipping businesses in Flippa!)

However, someone who has, over the last two years, successfully sold hundreds of templates is doing something right. I'll judge their success by how long they've been doing it and how many happy customers they've got.

Arggh! I've gone completely off-topic. Someone help and drag this back on course!

[benitez17]

benetiz17's assertion is that there is extra value to a Flippa $200 site than what can be picked up elsewhere for $20 or $50. This may or may not be true. I haven't done the detailed comparisons to say whether eBay templates offer better value than Flippa ones. Has anyone else?

Clinton, sorry that I didn't make this clear, but my assertion is that there is NO extra value in a Flippa $200 than what someone can find in a similar turnkey site purchased elsewhere, so the buyer would better off going to another marketplace to get their template site where they won't pay as much. That way they will have money left over for other things that would be useful to a first time buyer.

I do like the idea of Flippa success stories. However, we need to be cautious about who's writing them. We've had cases in the past of full-time site-flippers talking up the market enthusiastically (and deviously) just to get more buyers jumping in. What may be a better guage is the seller record. Template sellers come and go. Enthused by talk elsewhere of money to be made in site-flipping, they get all evangelical about it and launch into creating templates in various niches and flogging them off to wannabe entrepreneurs. They soon find it doesn't work and they give up and move on (in fact, many of them are selling their site flipping businesses in Flippa!).

I agree that asking for positive reports from past buyers is opening Flippa up to promoters who are just looking to sell themselves or the idea of flipping sites, but Flippa is already using their blog to hype up the idea of buying sites, and I would rather see them promote more established sites that all the garbage template sites.