We’ve been slaving away on Flippa.com for a long time, so now it’s your turn to break it – and remember, nothing is real, all the listings are fictional (for now!). But before you do that, here’s a bit of the back story behind why we decided to re-launch the SitePoint Marketplace as Flippa.com.
Why Flippa.com? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!
In a nut shell, the SitePoint Marketplace has outgrown its tab on sitepoint.com. For this marketplace to remain the #1 location for buying and selling web sites, and for us to properly service the needs of our buyer and seller community, it simply had to have its own identity – it had to be set free from sitepoint.com. Once you’ve had a chance to look around the site we’re confident that you’ll agree it was the right move.
What’s Under the Hood?
As well as a snazzy new name, a new location, and a new design, there are a lot of new and exciting features to check out on flippa.com. Here are just a few of the features we’ve added…
1. Private Sales as an alternative to Auctions.
As a seller you now have two ways to sell your site. You can run a public auction and accept bids – with the highest bidder (over your reserve price) winning the auction – or you can choose a ‘private sale’.
A private sale allows you to take offers for your site in private. You can accept, reject, or submit counter offers to the buyer. Listing via a private sale is a great way to test the market if you’re not totally sure what your site is worth, or you simply don’t want everyone knowing your business. As a buyer, seeking out private sale listings is a great way to go under the radar, especially if you don’t want other buyers knowing what you’re up to.
2. Customisable categorisation and powerful advanced search.
You can now define your own categories. In the old marketplace we defined what a “start up site” was and an “established site” and so on. This caused way too much confusion. It’s now up to buyers to define their own categories based on data that sellers have entered for their listing. For instance, I might setup a saved search for “sites with more than 10,000 page-views a month” and I might call that “established sites”. It’s totally up to you! Our powerful advanced search allows you to do this and more!
3. Automatic email notification of listings matching your search criteria.
You can save predefined searches and have email notifications sent to you when sites are listed on flippa.com that match your criteria. This is great if you don’t get time to search the marketplace everyday. For example, I might be interested in hearing about “gardening sites with more than $1,000 revenue a month with a buy it now price of less than $12,000″. The possibilities are endless.
4. More certainty with phone number verification required for everyone.
We now require everyone to verify their phone number before they can bid, comment, or sell a site on flippa.com. You’re free to look around, but if you want in on the action, you need to identify yourself. Phone verification is not the be all and end all, it’s just a step in the right direction in terms of building trust within the buyer and seller community.
5. Site ownership verification required to give you confidence in what you’re buying.
All sellers are now required to verify that they control the site they are selling before their listing can go live on flippa.com. Again, we realize that this is a small inconvenience for sellers, but it means that buyers can bid with a lot more confidence.
6. Greater suite of verified site statistics.
As a buyer we now provide you with a wider range of stats about the sites for sale on flippa.com to help you make an informed decision.
7. View counters on all listings
We also now provide a view counter on all listings. This is a great way to measure the success of your listing. If your listing is getting plenty of views from potential buyers but no bids perhaps your price is too high or something else is wrong with your site. It’s just another way to gauge interest in your listing.
8. Simplicity
You should find the whole user experience a lot nicer. We’ve tried to keep it as simple and easy to use as possible! We hope you agree, but if you think we’ve made your life harder in some places, we want to hear from you.
9. New “Just Sold” and “Ending Soon” tabs
The new front page of flippa.com now shows sites that have just recently been sold and also sites where the auction is ending soon. This was one of the most requested features from existing users.
10. New pricing model
As a business we want to expand the professional support we offer buyers and sellers, and give both parties what they need to trade in confidence and complete successful transactions. At the same time we also want to lower the upfront cost to you, reduce your risk, and align our interests with yours.
We have therefore set the listing fee (for all sites) to $19 and introduced a success fee at 5% of the sale price (capped at $499). The success fee is only payable if you sell your site – so the most you have to lose for placing a listing is now only $19. We feel that the new pricing model will help move the marketplace in the right direction.
What does Flippa aim to achieve?
Our aim is to continue to build a professional, trusted location online for buying and selling web sites. We want to strengthen our position as the #1 destination for serious web site traders – so as a seller you can be sure that when you list your site for sale on flippa.com, it sells, and as a buyer you can quickly and easily find and close transactions in a trusted environment.
Love It, Hate It, Let Us Know
We’d love your help to iron out any issues you find (we did mention ‘beta’, didn’t we?). It’s a cliche, but help us to help you!
Remember, comments on this blog are disabled, we’re only accepting feedback for now via email (this will give us the opportunity to also test our support systems). So if you notice any issues or you have any feedback for us, simply email us at betafeedback@flippa.com, or use the Feedback tab on the site. We look forward to hearing from you.
