How has Flippa settled in?
Selling Websites, Sitepoint October 22nd, 2009As many of you know, Sitepoint has split its marketplace. While link exchanges, service advertisements etc., are still with Sitepoint, website sales have moved to a new company and a new domain: http://www.flippa.com.
Flippa, controversially, charges a “success fee”. While you still pay for listing a site – albeit, a slightly lower price than before – there’s a hefty 5% success fee (capped at $500). A summary of what has changed is on this Sitepoint thread.
Flippa does offer more filtering options and allows site buyers to specify just high PR sites, low Alexa ranked ones or those selling for more than $10K, for example. There are a few other improvements though it’s hotly debated whether the Web 2.0 look is an improvement on not. The overall Flippa concept and implementation come in for scathing attack in the comments on Flippa’s own blog triggering a frantic response from Flippa that they really are taking feedback.
The name, Flippa, and the overall design and focus of the new enterprise seems to cater for the lower priced-lower quality sites at the expense of the better ones. For example, anyone interested in buying a listed site at the BIN price is expected to complete the transaction immediately via Paypal. All well and good but Paypal has a limit of $10K. It’s apparent that Flippa doesn’t expect to list a lot of websites at above that price point. Interestingly, that’s the price point at which their success fee maxes out (5% of $10K = $500 which is the success fee cap).
What do you think of Flippa?
Added: Snapshot of Flippa page when you click the BIN button
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October 22nd, 2009 at 9:19 pm
“For example, anyone interested in buying a listed site at the BIN price is expected to complete the transaction immediately via Paypal.”
Can I just correct you there? Sellers can choose to take BIN payments via PayPal – with convenience benefits but with the $10k limit – or they can have BIN payments via any other payment method and have no upper limit.
And since you ask, we’ve had twenty or thirty sales in the last month over $10k. In fact, if you look at our High End listings, they’re ALL aimed to sell over $10k: http://flippa.com/buy-websites?filterby=listings-highend We think Flippa’s the best place for anyone wishing to buy or sell a website in that price range.
Always interested to hear other opinions, though!
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Hi Dave, thanks for dropping in. Sorry, it wasn’t worded well. I meant that the transaction can be completed immediately only via Paypal. When you click the Buy Now button on any listing – whatever the BIN price – you get told: “…you will be redirected to http://www.paypal.com where you must pay (the BIN price)… ”
It looks like either you didn’t realise that Paypal has a $10K limit … or you figured that the $10K+ sales are such a small percentage it didn’t make sense to tailor the landing page to take into account that some sales are for over $10K.
I’ve added an image if that helps explain it.
November 5th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I think one of the nicest features of Flippa is the ability to get so much third-party information just by scanning the left column. Although it’s much more expensive now, some of the costs can be offset such as splitting the success fee. Nice post.