Any advice for selling a website?

[DeckardCain]

Say you had a site in a smallish niche (relatively speaking)... how would you test the waters of a sale? Would you ever reach out to competitors that you know are making a lot of money and try to sell it privately?

 

[Dankovich]

You could try to sell it to one of your competitors or you could choose to sell it on a forum or services like Empire Flippers.

 

[harris]

There are a lot of private brokers you can talk to. Do you have other sites in this niche? Do you plan on staying in the niche? If not, you don't really have to worry about outing it so you can even just use Flippa to sell it. Not a bad idea to talk to your competitors first. Do you have an open dialogue with any of them already, do you know each other at all?

 

[RiverStyx]

I'm a little further along the road than you so I'll chime in here. I have a small niche e-commerce business that I have been running since 2007 and I have decided to sell up. First, I contacted my competition to see if they were interested: first they were and then they weren't and then it just all petered out.(no replies to emails etc)

Second, I put it up for sale on flippa.com. I got a lot of interest from there but only one guy seemed serious. I'm still in talks with him but we've yet to agree a price. If he falls through I'm taking my last 3 months profit data and putting it up on empireflippers in the New Year. Xmas is very profitable so I'll run it through that for some extra cash.

I'm in the gardening niche market in the UK and the price I'm looking for is around the £30K-35K mark to give you some perspective on size.

To give you an idea of time, I've been working on selling it since June this year. A lot of time was lost when I was speaking with the competition. My advice would be, have all of your data in order- buyers ask an awful lot of questions, and then hit all the sales channels at once. Put it on either flippa or empire flippers and speak to your competition as well; no one needs to know where else its listed or who you're talking to. If you're lucky you'll have a few competing offers you can play against each other.

Or perhaps there is someone here who might be interested in it? Details?

PS: you do not have to out your site if you are selling it on flippa, I paid $100 extra to make people sign an NDA and that hides your URL from the public.

 

[EvolutionVision]

1. Make sure that every single thing of the site is perfectly processed out in clear SOPs. Check out sweetprocess.com if you need help to make it easy.

2. I'm friends with the EmpireFlippers and they do a good service. They also only average out the last 3 months of income for valuations which can be handy if your business is growing. If you want a private business broker (recommended) I can do an email invite if you PM me. I've sold a couple of businesses with this guy and he made it so damn simple.

3. Just in case, anyone who might sell a business even one day should read or listen to Built To Sell. Pure money.