Selling a site looks like an art… I see demand for professional website selling advisors who can broker to sell a legitimate site for a handsome amount.
If someone’s willing to take a plunge at that, PM me 
3six, dishonest buyers waste your time. But dishonest sellers do much more.
You won’t find fakers going to Jail.
Sellers and freelancers who sell worthless crap to steal your money should go to jail.
Well said… disagree aboyt tinyURLs though.
Edman, true. But then would you or I get conned by that? No, we’d argue that all the shills bids be removed and the price re-appraised. Exceptions: You and I - and a few others here confident enough about what they were doing - would also pay that second chance offer if we thought the site was a steal at that price. The losers are the buyers without proper experience of how the game is played.
There are also “sellers” who really have no interest in selling. They’re listing to get publicity, drive webmasters to their site, or to demonstrate their site’s value to a third party (bank manager/financier/off-site buyer/court/or even to settle a bet). It’s in their interest to get a ridiculously high shill bid from a friend to get around Sitepoint’s rules of having to sell to the highest bidder. (They also both get feedback for the price of a listing! They may get even more rep value from the history of “high value transactions”. If you were buying a $50K site you’d have more trust in someone who has a history of “selling” several $50-$100K sites).
For genuine sellers there’s always a risk with a shill: The site may not sell 
3Six, I love the “Tomato Frog” title. I’m going to quote that from now on and refer people to your post if they don’t know what the heck I’m talking about.
milliondollars, you’ve probably already got PMs from business brokers There are several here and several more outside if you go looking. Some are better than others, of course. I’m not a broker but - and I don’t know if I dare say this - I may be willing to help one or two people with a brief PM reply or two with advice. Rules: Don’t PM me unless your site is worth at least $20K. And not based on a DNscoop type of valuation either. Use this one for a realistic figure. I’ll reply if I have time. If I don’t reply, please don’t get offended. If you do ask me about a junk site that I think is worth less than $20K, I’ll ban all PMs from your user account. :mad: Always use “Top tips to selling your site” as the subject of your PM.
marcel, honesty and dishonesty are highly flexible concepts these days, unfortunately. So is the understanding of what’s “worthless cr*p”. There is no substitute for caveat emptor - let the buyer beware. Buying sites isn’t like going to your local supermarket. You don’t have the same rights, privileges, money-back guarantees or legal protection. Anyone stupid enough to think they do doesn’t have my sympathy.
Very, very helpful. Thanks.
Nice thread. Really helpful for me since I’m planning to sell a site for the first time. (Y)
If I may add one more tip that’s a shameless plug:
Before you list, read the article I’ve written for Sitepoint on valuing your website. Going in with realistic expectations makes the whole sales process that much more enjoyable
One thing that immediately turns me off is claiming to have “changed servers” just a short while ago.
Why? If you’re gonna sell a site, show some history, leave it the heck alone for at least a few months.
I see absolutely no logical reason you’d change servers unless you had a real problem with the old system, which is hardly confidence-inspiring in itself.
D.
Clinton,
as usual - solid advice for newbies to sitepoint.
david
Solid advice to anyone, actually.
Thank you,this is a excellent advice, I think this will help me a lot!
Thanks for all the kind comments. I put together a post on choosing an escrow company and was going to post it in another thread, but this may be the best place for it. So, here goes:
Let me explain some things most people don’t know about escrow services.
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With financial services it’s all about brand management. Escrow.com have done a brilliant job - their brand is synonymous with “escrow” as we’ve seen here. However, not many people know that escrow.com doesn’t handle the escrow transactions at escrow.com. It’s a company called IES who sorta “rent” the escrow.com website. Why don’t they own it? I don’t know but if IES ever ran into financial trouble, they could be liquidated and the escrow.com brand doesn’t get badly damaged; the owners could rent/lease the domain to someone else. That’s a masterstroke of property rental that webmasters here can only drool about
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Contrary to popular opinion, escrow.com doesn’t cater for website sales - just motor vehicles, general merchandise and domains. That creates considerable problems if you ever run into a dispute with the other party. Sellers can retain the core part of the agreement (like the code and content) and demand payment if they have transferred just the domain name. Buyers can take possession of valuable code/programs/database and reject the “domain transaction” and they’ve got all the rest for free. This is a big flaw. For many years I’ve been speaking with management at escrow.com about just this point. They assure me it will change in the near future.
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If you live in Europe your best bet is escroweurope.com. Also, they are far better at transactions involving software/code/data - they are geared towards handling this. But, more importantly for people living in Europe, they offer better protection, (Escrow.com is geared towards protecting people in California - in a BIG way), better privacy, and free help with legalities like free draft contracts. escroweurope is eBay’s preferred escrow company for all their European offices. And is also the preferred escrow handler for many major UK and European companies. Buy a poker site through escroweurope and you don’t risk arrest the next time you go to America (OK, that’s a bit alarmist
but US authorities do have form in this matter, they’ve arrested owners of bigger poker sites than yours or mine). Further, this lack of escrow privacy has implications for those who believe they have private WHOIS protection. -
Similarly with EscrowAustralia. I haven’t used them but I hear good things about them. Again, companies like eBay who know a sh*t lot more about escrow transactions than I do, recommend this company for Australian residents.
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If you’re selling domains you’re already probably using the SEDO escrow service. They combine a Sitepoint type marketplace with a very fine backend escrow service.
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Californian law is a good reason for all non-Californians to avoid companies registered in California. It is draconian. It is hugely geared towards protecting Californians at the expense of everyone else. It is exhorbitantly expensive for escrow companies. No, let me correct that; it’s an exhorbitantly expensive protection racket. This is how it works: Any company wanting to escrow a transaction involving one party who’s based in California has to cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars and submit themselves to ridiculous dictats of the Californian Commissioner. Here’s an external article on just how ridiculous, overbearing, pompous and dictatorial Californian law is in this regard… but that’s offsite so the Commissioner doesn’t sue Sitepoint.
Why does this affect you?
a. This pushes up prices. A company like escrow.com registered in California has to recover all those fees from someone. That’s you and me. Compare their prices with the good, solid, iescrow. For the $10K+ transactions that I normally do, escrow.com is about 50% more expensive.
b. Any contract you’ve entered into with the other party is worthless. Escrow.com requires you to sign up to their terms and if there’s a problem you go to their arbitrators who work to escrow’s terms and Californian law. Your agreement with the other party is worth less than $0. If it needs to go to court, you have to fly to California.
I have no bone to pick with escrow.com/IES. The company who do the transactions, IES, have always behaved well with me, processed many large transactions smoothly for me, and I still promote their affiliate program on some of my sites and tell people how good they are and many other webmasters do too
I agree!!! This is what I do for a full-time job and lisint the information in an easy to read format is your best selling tool. No matter how much infoamtion you provide. Like the saying goes. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Great tips… I have a question, we have auctions on a regular basis on eBay and I was wondering how I can go about (if at all) promoting those eBay auctions here in the SitePoint marketplace ?
Is it acceptable to publish a SitePoint notice publicising the external eBay auction?
I’ve had a quick look through a few of the marketplace (and forum) guidelines, but I didn’t notice a specific answer.
Thanks,
Rob
Made a mistake and submitted more than 1 domain. Sitepoint cancelled it. However, did they refund my money? credit my account? - they are quick to take the money, quick to cancel but its been over a week now and the refund process has been very slow - no communication at all after 4 emails / pm
All one way traffic
I have another to add to this list.
-If you aren’t too keen to sell, don’t list.
That is to say, if you listed your franchise resources directory with all kinds of information like where you get the traffic and how, wher you find buyers for leads etc., someone like me who likes to read listings for new business ideas may be your new competition -if you don’t end up selling.
It is safest to list basic revenue, traffic info publicly and share further info with those who seem like they are seriously interested.
-If you aren’t too keen to sell, don’t list.
Sometimes listings are a great way to gauge the price the market will bear - you could always set a high reserve of a billion dollars.
The type of information you mention is not what most people would disclose even when they do want to sell their site. Opening the doors to copycats is not a good way to inspire buyers to bid.
I agree about that whole 12x revenue pricing, that really only works when you deal with merchant sites, other than that I think it’s pretty useless. You may have a site that cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars to make plus all the time put into it, but you only make about $30 a month–somehow people think you need to give it up for only $300 dollars.
In the end it all depends on the specific type of site you’re selling… but people still think that formula applies to everything.
What it cost you to make is usually irrelevant. That money you’ve invested in making the site is only worth what it can recover in earnings. More
What it cost the seller may be somewhat irrelevant, but what it costs -in more or less objective terms- to build such and such type of website or web business is relevant to a seller’s price expectations; as, if potential buyers were to venture into this line of business themselves, they would face similar costs.
So, like it says in the linked, what matters more is what comes out of the site and an investment of $20,000 put in GUI design may seem like an overkill to most buyers, however, it can’t be scratched over as nothing either. The common sense lies in between there, somewhere…