The market for buying and selling websites is huge and it is rapidly growing. This makes a lot of But, which is the best website broker?
Being a website seller, I know how hard it can be to sell off one of your sites. While I’ve gotten used to selling my babies, I know exactly how important it is for a website seller that the website ends up in the right hands – and especially important is that you get a good valuation on your baby.
Nowadays we at Hekkup only sell sites via our waiting list, but this is only possible since we are lucky to have a group of buyers that like our way of building websites, and want to grow their own website portfolios with them.
I sold my first website in 2015 for $88,920 – which is a huge deal for a 17-year-old like I was at the time. It was my first ever affiliate website and I got very lucky with the timing and the niche I chose. Anyhow, that’s for another story. Let’s get into what a website broker is, and what function they have in the sale process.
A website broker is a person, or a company, that help to connect the seller of a website with a buyer of the website, and they get paid a commission once a deal is settled. Therefore, they have an incentive to close as many deals as possible.
Here’s some things they do:
Website brokers build their business model based on primarily two things 1) listing fees and 2) commission. Let me explain. Listing fees are something all website brokers charge for you to be able to list your website for sale. These can vary from $30-600 for a first-time seller.
The commission is another aspect. It is one of the reasons why we, instead of working with a website broker, pay our referrals a set percentage for each sale they refer us. Website brokers charge 10-15% of each sale, which for an occasional seller is not a lot, but for us every 7-10th site we would be selling for free.
There is a fine line here that many doesn’t know about. A broker is a company who is actively pitching your site to possible investors, while a marketplace is, well a marketplace where you can showcase your site.
Marketplaces are riskier for the buyer and seller since there is no middleman that can make sure the other party is a trustable one. While you can find good websites to buy on marketplaces like Flippa, there are also a lot of rotten ones where someone have made a site and bought fake traffic to it to sell the website on an inexperienced buyer.
Knowing how many percentage of sites listed for sale are actually sold is a good metric to follow if you want to make sure your website is sold. One problem with this metric is that there is no easy way to find this out unless the broker themselves state this on their website, and no broker with a low closing rate would write about it on their website.
This is the first name that comes to my mind when it comes to buying or selling a website. A thing to note here, they aren’t a broker but a marketplace. But, their processes with respect to buying or selling a website is probably the best and close to what a website broker does.
I have personally sold and bought websites on this platform. My experience was smooth as a buyer and seller. The platform is not only restricted to websites, but you can also list other assets like Amazon FBA, Merch by Amazon, Amazon KDP, Apps etc.
Buying a website is fairly easy, you may have to make a 5% deposit to get details regarding the asset (URL, Traffic sources etc) for obivious reasons. There are some public listings which do not require a deposit to view the data. Empire Flippers acts as an intermediary between you and the seller until the purchase and migration.
Listing a property for sale is pretty straight forward if you are a legitimate business. They ask for all the basic information related to the website, be honest and transparent here, it will surely help you fetch a higher price. Empire Flippers charge both a listing fee and commission(based on the sale amount)
For first time sellers, the listing fee is $294 and for repeat sellers, it is $97. For information regarding the commisions they charge, refer the image below.
Also, an active blog section with insightful updates is a boon for buyers and sellers. Empire flippers scores all the right points for both buyers and sellers bringing transparency in this space. Hence, I am happy to place them on top of the best website brokers list!
Started in 2010, FE International has come a long way as a website broker. It was founded by Thomas Smale, a familiar name if you have spent sometime on online internet marketing forums like BHW etc.
The process of listing a website is very similar to other platforms. However, buying a website/ an online business is not as easy as Empire Flippers or Flippa. This is understandable because they deal with businesses in the mid five to mid-seven range.
The funds are managed through escrow hence ensuring the best protection to both buyers and sellers. Few documents like Letter of Intent (LOI) and Asset Purchase Agreement (APA) is required to go forward with the purchase.
These documents may seem like a hassle but it adds to the transparency of the process. A fee of 2.5% (upto $1000) is levied on the buyer to cover some of the administrative costs. In addition to this, 1% escrow transaction charge is split between buyers and sellers.
There is no listing fee for sellers unlike other platforms. A small fee will be charged only after the sale of the business. You will have to maintain exclusivity and not list the business on other platforms.
Overall, FE International provides a secure and transperant platform to buy and sell websites making the second best website broker.
This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Flippa. Having started at 2009, Flippa has grown rapidly as a marketplace for websites and web-related businesses. They have facilitated sales of over 250,000 online businesses till date (the number keeps growing).
There are two options to sell your websites, you can either list it on the market place or go for their broker matching service. The first option works well for a new website while the latter is prefect if you are a profit making online business.
The fee is two fold like most other platforms, there is a listing fee and flippa success fee (commision on a successful sale). For a basic listing, the fee is $25 and the flippa success fee is 10% (which can be paid after the sale).
If you opt for the broker option, the listing fee would be $200 and there are two levels of Flippa success fee on this one. Refer the image below to get a clear idea of both the options.
The process of buying/ selling a website on flippa is very simple which is one of the reasons for its popularity. But I noticed that some assets listed on Flippa are of low quality which makes me question their vetting process. Hence I give them the third spot on the list of best brokers.
Being transparent with respect to traffic and revenue data. Inflating numbers doesn’t help as there are tools to detect the traffic and most of the website brokers do their due deligence in checking the stats, so why falsify the numbers? It only does more harm than good.
Good question, we have seen that good looking and easy to navigate websites sell for a higher price. With Google giving a lot of importance real-time metrics, having an easy to navigate site help with that aspect too. Having said that, re-design makes sense only if you are generating revenue from the asset.
Also, you will have to ensure that the URLs remain the same during the re-design/re-structure, otherwise you may end up hurting the current rankings resulting in revenue loss.
You are investing a sizeable amount of money and are going to grow the asset even further. You will have to look into the scalability of the project. Can I broaden the website with more niches? Can I cover more articles by extending the keyword research? These are a few of the questions you must ask yourself before buying any website.