Tips for buying an awesome site on Flippa

I wrote about ten common Flippa scams recently, so I thought I’d follow up with some ways you can vet a listing to see if the site is as good as the seller claims.

There are some great sites to be had if you have the budget; a recent example is spyrestudios.com which sold for over $60,000 – but with the amount it makes, it was definitely worth it.

1. Comments on the listing

These are the easiest thing to check, and it’s likely that some good questions will be asked throughout the auction. One thing Flippa does really well is dissuade sellers from deleting comments on the listings; it will show you the number of deleted comments at the top, and also clearly mark comments that have been deleted but then restored by the seller. Always pay close attention to restored comments as they give a great insight into things the seller potentially wants to hide.

Many sellers are put off deleting comments because they will usually be asked why, so check comments carefully for questions that have been ignored or skimmed over (especially when there are multiple questions per comment).

2. Bids and amount

Some listings are overlooked, and some are just not that interesting, but if a site claims to be making a decent amount of money and yet has an extremely low price, especially towards the end of the auction, that’s something to be wary of. It may well just mean the listing hasn’t been publicised enough, but do some digging on the details first.

Be careful of the opposite scenario; high bids or large numbers of bids don’t necessarily equal a great site. It may simply mean that other people have been convinced by the seller or there is shill bidding going on.

3. The seller’s previous sites

Many sellers will draw your attention to the fact they have a great rating and they’ve sold sites before. Make sure you check out the other sites they’ve owned and sold, especially ones which are similar (either in niche or monetisation) to the one you’re interested in.

What you’re looking for is whether the site is still active. If it returns a 404 or a parking page, you know there’s something fishy going on. Even if it was sold eight or nine months ago, if the site was any good it would still be sitting there making money. This is regardless of whether the winner paid and took the site, or whether it was left to the old owner because of non-payment. Either way, a large proportion of previous sites being dead is a huge warning signal. If the seller has several hundreds or even thousands of websites, then the odd one or two that don’t make much in comparison may just be dropped or forgotten about. Sites making large amounts of money will never just be ditched.

4. The reserve price and the buy it now price

As sites are frequently valued based on an average of monthly earnings over a set period of time (usually 12 or 24 months), sites claiming to make a lot will usually set a pretty high buy it now price. Keep an eye on both the reserve (the amount of the highest bid will be displayed in red if it’s not met the reserve price, green if it has) and the BIN.

Sites that make little/no money sometimes have a very low reserve price, say $300, but a very high buy it now price. I’ve seen as high as $150,000. If the site owner is claiming to make $15,000 a month it makes no sense to have a reserve as low as $300; I made a similar point in my previous post about Flippa.

Some sellers take a risk and set the reserve at 0. They will usually make this another selling point in the listing though, or will have made a comment saying there is no reserve. This isn’t a warning sign; they may just be confident the site will sell for a reasonable amount and want to kick off interest early on in the auction. Be careful you aren’t judging a site based on that alone.