Some sellers stats - see the most prolific of Flippa listers

[Clinton]

There are some people who make a living on Flippa (or "try" to make a living on Flippa) selling templates. Some of them are a lot more prolific than others and I guess the ones who list the most are the ones who've found a way to make the activity profitable.

Here's a rough breakdown:

flippa.png

One of the biggest offenders / most successful (depending on how you look at it) is smartbusiness with 849 listings and even better than him is the (now) banned Sun Shine who listed over 1,000 before he got banned. (That's just in the Sun Shine account. He seems to have had other accounts as well.)

The ones with the most failed listings are the likes of allenjohn, motley and surprise, surprise Latonas (the latter seemingly using Flippa to drive traffic rather than to sell). 50-60 unsold listings seem to be no problem for these folk.

[monty]

Thanks Clinton, really interesting stats.

I would be intrigued to see how many of those sites were still "live" as well. I occasionally have a flick through the sites sold section for past sales in niches I'm interested in, and it always seems odd to come across the occasional site which Flippa says sold for 4, 5 or 6 figures which the buyer has abandoned 18-24 months later ( eg replaced with a parking page) .

[Clinton]

Bear in mind also that relistings by the same seller suggest there's a huge market in selling your site in Flippa, buying it back privately from the new owner and then relisting it. Again and again and again

[snowelephant]

People sell their sites back to the original owner? I would think if a lot of buyers returned their sites at a loss the perpetrator would end up banned eventually.

[tke71709]

People sell their sites back to the original owner? I would think if a lot of buyers returned their sites at a loss the perpetrator would end up banned eventually.

I sell you a restaurant, you've never run a restaurant, not surprisingly you have trouble running said restaurant and profits drop (and maybe you actually start losing money on it). I see that you are having trouble and come back 6 months later and offer to buy back the restaurant at less than you paid for it. You jump at the offer because at least you get to salvage some of your investment rather than riding it straight to zero.

Replace restaurant with website above.

Nothing illegal, or even immoral about this. People shouldn't be buying things they don't understand.

[DomainMagnate]

it's interesting how SmartBusiness had $200k in sales with most sales being in $100-300. I guess you can make decent money this way too.

[Clinton]

Some of these career site sellers are getting the hell out of the business. Here's one seller who regularly sells templates in Flippa selling his template selling business.

[Thomas]

Some of these career site sellers are getting the hell out of the business. Here's one seller who regularly sells templates in Flippa selling his template selling business.

I dunno about that... most of them will just be back with a new alias once their "business" has sold.

[kvmcable]

Some of these career site sellers are getting the hell out of the business. Here's one seller who regularly sells templates in Flippa selling his template selling business.

Ditto Meathead123 - I've been watching this seller for months with his usual high traffic claims on brand new websites without even the courtesy of a fake traffic report. This guy isn't going anywhere although I believe Flippa should have sanctioned him long ago.

[Clinton]

This seller is called mycompanyname. I'm not saying he's suspicious as I don' t know who he is, but the new tool I released yesterday allows us to do some digging

Flippa has uncovered two possible links to other accounts (maybe accounts he's running himself in other names?) - flipjoy and DevelopConcept. Strange. Just two connections.

OK, let's see how we can find some more info. Using our in-house search tool, this is the results page for mycompanyname. In the right hand box are the two connections Flippa has uncovered. Scroll down to all the name servers mycompanyname uses.

Many of the nameservers are from big hosting companies such as bluehost.com. However, there are some less familiar nameservers there, like seoquickstop.com. The 3rd column tells us there were 216 sites listed in Flippa using seoquickstop.com. Now if that's a big name hosting company hosting millions of sites, this won't be unusual. But, is it? Fortunately, it's not difficult to tell. Do a Google search for all domains using these name servers registered. Only 156! And there are several sellers in Flippa selling domains using those name servers. Hmm. Hardly likely to all be different people to this guy whose name seems to be Rodney Marine (from WHOIS).

Now if you click on a row that shows ns1.seoquickstop on that seller's page in our tool, the tool will generate a list of all the other Flippa users associated with that name server. He's associated with, among others, StarBusiness and GoodWill110 who have, respectively, this listing and this listing, both domains registered to the same Rodney Marine (1 | 2).

Flippa spotted one of those (possibly) as that account is banned but there are several others getting away. Here's yet another Flippa account, hakiesr, who is not yet banned who has a listing for a domain also registered to Rodney Marine!

Flippa is technically capable of detecting these connections, but they don't do it. That seems to provide a bit of protection for these scammers. Why would someone want multiple accounts at Flippa? To shill bid?

Another name server he uses is ns1.tbmnewsfeeds.com. Click on that row and you'll see over a dozen other Flippa users associated with that name server!