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Buying & Selling Websites

How to find Websites for Sale (35 Sites Ranked and Rated)

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My last two posts on building a marketplace (stay peeled for part 3 and 4) were originally born from debate on user’s over dependance on Flippa as the only marketplace for listing websites for sale. A lot of the articles I tend write are about Flippa, not because they’re the only show in town, but because

1) We have adequate statistical data from them which can be used as an indication for market trends on the whole and

2) They are a pretty big show, even if not the biggest in terms of total transactional value.

With that said, reading the past posts on this site could lead someone to believe that there are less than 5 places to buy established websites online when this is far from being the case. Below is a list of 35 websites that list online businesses for sale, ordered by a quality score and linking to the specific section on the site that lists what we’re looking for. This score was manually calculated and rounded to the nearest whole number for each site to take into account

  • Overall proportion of established sites to total relevant listings
  • The average size and value of the established businesses being sold.
  • Total Volume of listings
  • The rate new listings seem to be added (sites that did not seem to have an update in the few months were skipped)
  • The traffic that each site attracts (on the theory that marketplaces with more traffic will in turn attract more buyers)
1. Flippa (9)

I’m guessing little needs to be said about the current leading website for sale marketplace. Many established sites and many sellers.

2. Daltons Business (8)

Predominantly UK focused, Dalton’s have sold established offline businesses for several years, and continue to represent sellers online. Businesses here tend to be very established ecommerce companies often with requirements for stockholding (in their present format), so valuations will often include stock and assets. The opportunity does exist for a savvy entrepreneur to take the firesale approach, making a low offer for the site only and changing the business model to a dropshipping one.

3. Buy Sell Website (7)

Following in the trend of what seems to be a renaissance of crappy design but surprisingly good content, this site has a fairly active established websites for sale section with a frequently updated and viewed set of listings typically between $1,000 and $100,000. Sites do seem slightly overvalued though.

4. Quiet Light (7)

A simple but good looking site, run by an experienced US web broker. Mostly higher tier sites but always solid businesses.

5. I Merge Advisors (aka eBizBrokers) (6)
6. Experienced People Forums (6)

A premium resource for anyone in the business, this forum has a very small but serious section for individuals and brokers selling both single properties and sometimes whole portfolios. This forum is tightly moderated, and they do an excellent job of keeping the evil spam merchants at bay, so extra credit here for users that will likely point out something that doesnt seem quite right.

7. BizSale.co.uk (6)

Another UK focused business marketplace, this site (surprisingly) has some credible listings providing you can see past the fact it looks like it was designed by a 9 year old on acid.

8. Website Properties (6)

A small but well vetted collection of website for sale listings. This site seems to be broker – broker focused but offers some protection by asking users to complete an NDA before sending details of the site in question.

9. Webmaster Talk Forum (6)

This is starting to become a favourite of mine for simple arbitrage. The community here is quite savvy and generally, like Digital Point, prices are kept relatively sensible.

10. Website For Sale Ads (6)

If you can see past the overpriced turnkey sites, this low key listings page appears to be a classified scraping script that has some fairly decent established web businesses for sale.

11. Businesses for Sale.com (5)

Another case of finding the diamonds amongst the dirt, but BFS offers a fair selection of established and higer tier sites for sale. One good example found at the time of writing this post was an established five year old forum with 120,000 registered members. (If you share my immaturity, you’ll also laugh at the line “Willing to train the new owner” when you see the context of the site :) )

12. Website Broker.com (5)

A relatively long established website for sale marketplace with fairly solid SEO giving it prime position in the SERPs for various website for sale related terms. Potentially the only current competitor to Flippa’s existing format, but they have serious spam problems, and issues with crazy over valuations that would first need reigning in.

13. Irish Webmaster Forum (5)

Forum specialising in Irish (.ie) sites with a significant proportion of early stage but established sites for sale.

14. Digital Point Forums (5)

Previously better, DPF has since become inundated with listing spam, which isnt aided by their failure to seperate people selling websites from those buying websites. Nonetheless, you can still find decent early stage websites for sale here often with terrible content (think autoblog heaven) but decent rankings in the SERPs and some Page Rank.

15. BizBuySell (4)
16. Business Mart (5)
17. Business Broker.net (5)
18. Webmasters Marketplace.com (4)

Currently one of the sites we index, WMP did initially show promise as a credible marketplace, but quality listings seem to be on the decline lately.

19. Tidget.com (4)
20. Global BX (4)
21. Right Biz.co.uk (3)

Another classified listing scraping service but with some good results from established UK brokers.

22. The Warrior Forum (3)

Not the greatest selection of established sites as most of the listings here are for templates or starter sites, but you will find the occassional gem. This forum has always been a little bit of an enigma, as there are MANY experienced site traders on this forum, so I would expect the overall quality to be much higher.

23. Website Slate (3)

Predominantly geared towards starter sites, there are several established sites for sale such as this one worth a mention.

24. Search Forecast (3)

A very small marketplace, ranked more for potential, with a few quality listings.

25. Deal A Site (3)

This marketplace initially got off to a good start, but lately seems to have stalled slightly and has seen an increase in low value / spam sites. There is the occassional established site to be found, such as this membership site apparently earning $1,000 per month, but I think much due diligence would be in order here.

26. Business Sale Report (UK) (3)
27. Namepros Forum (3)
28. Affiliates 4U (2)

A fairly active affiliate forum with a section dedicated to buying and selling websites. It’s mostly domains listed here, but there are some established sites such as this DVD rental affiliate site

29. Websites for Sale World (2)

Unfortunately, not a lot of activity happening in the established sites for sale section, but there is some potential here should the owners figure out a plan.

30. Daniweb (2)
31. Website Acquire (2)

The occassional bargain is often obscured by the sheer volume of ‘less valuable offerings’. There is the occassional interesting find such as this two year old revenue producing small site.

32. DN Forum (2)

As this forum is focused on Domain Names, most of the listings seem to be for very good domains with no so good sites built upon them. Expect little by the way of revenue or traffic details being posted.

33. Business Trader (AU) (2)
34. Ebay (1)

It’s debatable whether or not Ebay should be included in this list as their are very few sites worth considering listed for sale on here. It is still worth a mention purely due to age and volume; for example this T-shirt Community site could prove valuable to someone already in this niche.

35. Ready Site Sale (-)

At time of writing, the listing detail pages were failing to load for this site, so I’m unable to verify if the listings here seem genuine and how often they are updated. There does however appear to be several plus $10,000 sites actively listed.

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  • http://www.monarch-garments.com/ Sharma

    This is great! I dont agree with all of the ranks but overall a good job.

    Thanks

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      No problem.

  • http://www.imergeadvisors.com Dan Megan

    Thanks for the information Justin(and the mention :) ). Since our description wasn’t on the list, I’ll simply say iMerge Advisors is a business broker, we generally engage with web based businesses that are driving revenues and profits and we maintain a large network of buyers looking for such acquisitions.

    Selling yourself or using a broker comes down to a few questions. One, are you selling a site maybe recently developed with little revenue? If so, the marketplaces and forums are the best place to go, at least initially. If you have an established business, that demands your daily attention and generates decent returns it may makes sense to engage a broker that can focus his time on selling the business, has direct access to a network of buyers, and understands how to maximize valuation in the marketplace.

    Hats off to those that sell their business on their own, seriously. But it does take time, can be complicated and frustrating, and if your not careful can interfere with the daily tasks of running the business. Hope this helps.

    Great Read Justin..

    O

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Thanks Dan.

      You’ve got some good sites in your portfolio which I know will interest some of the readers here who have sizeable budgets.

      Most of them are out of my price bracket, but I hope to change that soon :)

      Justin

  • http://www.petertdavis.com Peter Davis

    Nice list. Would be nice to have more comments about each of them, but the list itself is useful.

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Thanks Peter.

      I did want to add a small review for each, but then it started to get more about my personal opinion and I wanted to keep it more subjective.

      Justin

  • http://www.ArticlesCRUSH.com Article Distribution

    Wow, this is a great job you did here. I followed you from the Warriorforum post and am impressed.

    This list will surely come handy for anyone attempting to sell or even buy sites.

    Well done!

    Kingsley – founder of ArticlesCRUSH.com
    Becoming The Best Article Distribution Service!

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Thanks Kingsley

  • http://www.vworker.com RACNicole

    This is great! Another good resource is Rentacoder’s bulletin board (vWorker). So many people associate Rentacoder with buyer-coder type transactions, but there’s an area on the site which actually lets buyers seek out completed websites.

    You can find out more about it here:

    http://www.vworker.com/RentACoder/SoftwareBuyers/BulletinBoardAuction.asp?blnDidRacRedirectToVworker_RequestParm=true

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Thanks Nicole,

      I’ll certainly take a look

      Justin

  • http://experienced-people.net/forums/blog.php Clinton

    BTW, Justin, thanks for the mention of our forums (in #6)

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Anytime.

      In my opinion you rank higher in terms of quality, but volume has a weighting to it also.

  • http://flippa.com/auctions/108161/6-5k-NETMonth-Online-BUSINESS--100-Passive-Income--NO-RESERVE-PRICE Thomas

    Hey Justin,

    Awesome list! A lot of sites there I didn’t know about and will definitely be trying them in the future as I build my brokerage business. Goes to show there are plenty of legitimate competitors to Flippa out there.

    Thomas

  • http://allcoverletters.com/ Robbie

    Thanks for the fantastic list! I think this is one of the first updated list of sites where you can actually buy and sell websites. Helped me find some great alternatives to just flippa and digitalpoint!

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Thanks Robbie

  • http://www.secondwindmarketplace.com Erik Rank

    Justin – I don’t want to self promote, however you and I have talked before. This is an excellent run down. SecondWindMarketplace.com recently launched.