Is it for real..?

Alright I am spending quite a lot of time on Flippa these days. But at times its difficult for me to understand I might not be such an expert but ya I do have some knowledge. I recently came across this auction

https://flippa.com/2798210-477-month-affiliate-cbsite-since-2010-1-no-reserve-growing-passive-revenue

The guy claims that "The site is well established and receives traffic from Article Directories, Social Bookmarking, Press Release and others sites"

Earning : $477/month

When you look at due diligence statistics they don't make much sense to me.

The guy gets 83 bids and website sold for $ 585

He also has

100% positive feedback out of 6 received
$4,775 in value across 9 transactions

Same is the case with his another website,

https://flippa.com/2794701-must-see-177-week-autoblog-2-yrs-0-hrs-work-affiliate-cbsite-1-no-reserve

Website sold for $900

Alexa Rank : 17,359,069

Claimed Revenue : $177/week

If he is generating such a traffic from his mentioned sources Alexa rank should be better.

Would appreciate if people give their views on this case. Thanks

Th numbers are speaking to you. It's simple math. The results are rigged.

Heads Up : I would buy my own products through 5 or more accounts in order to gain the "trusted seller allure". Then boom, here comes the stick up!

Ya but usually its easy to differentiate between the genuine sellers and scam artists. The guy don't even have any linked profile and as far as I know its not easy to trick flippa they do have sophisticated system to avoid shill bidding. In addition to that hes got some real positive feedback.

I agree with hat world... it is not easy to trick flippa... their system is awesome

Yups so still a mystery. Would appreciate if some Flippa expert solve this mystery for me

there is no mystery that is simple game.

why you will sell site for $585 if you are making $477 per month .... making no sense

They are using other account to bid and its easy to trick flippa. You just need lots of proxy and sim card to shill bidding and if you will check bid history only 16 people bid 83 times and that is look like own bids.

i am 100% agree with Annah this is what they are doing. Buy with own account then making people fool

Stay away from these auction

Alright lets agree on that point. But how come people are giving such a positive feedback after buying these sites. Well maybe people are too quick to give feedback and don't realize till the time they see the actual performance.

i never liked having only a few days to give feedback. usually it takes a month to know if you bought a dud or not on flippa. I've bought a few and sold a few on flippa. I never made money from the ones I bought. Was lucky to break even.

Tip: if you want to know what a bullshit description reads like, just search for "Pligg" and you'll see all the stats about members and visitors...oh, but it just hasn't been monetized yet...yeah that's because it's all bot traffic.

seopencil said:

there is no mystery that is simple game.

why you will sell site for $585 if you are making $477 per month .... making no sense

They are using other account to bid and its easy to trick flippa. You just need lots of proxy and sim card to shill bidding and if you will check bid history only 16 people bid 83 times and that is look like own bids.

i am 100% agree with Annah this is what they are doing. Buy with own account then making people fool

Stay away from these auction

Click to expand...

That seems to making sense to me also. Flippa's system is still not 100% fool proof yet.

There is a raft of tricks going on there at flippa read what kvmcable says here

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/site-flipping/456018-un-announced-flippa-price-increase.html

Scams like this happen everyday on the Flippa marketplace because Flippa allows it. This seller's listings violate at least 3 Flippa rules and you can report his listings until you're blue in the face and Flippa will correct the title or description wording (maybe) and let it run. If you go crazy and start reporting the 70% of Flippa listings that violate Flippa's rules they'll turn on the ignore switch and no longer answer your reports.

Each page of new listings on Flippa is 30 listings and if you know Flippa's rules you'll find more than 20 violating one rule or another. Flippa doesn't care and doesn't want to hear about it. The only person they truly ban are people that don't pay them fees. The rest get temp bans, suspensions and with a good email response allowed to get back on Flippa and start selling again. The majority of Flippa's revenue come from sellers like this guy - they aren't going to enforce rules on him!

I predicted in my previous posts that Flippa inventory would fall and seasoned sellers would disappear. This morning Flippa has just under 1600 active lisitngs (compare to more than 2200 back in April before price increases).

Their traffic plummeted for 3 months until a recent advertising spend that brought their numbers back up.

To answer your question, sellers like the one posted are everywhere on Flippa because they have no conscience about lying and giving fake information to buyers and Flippa does nothing to stop it. Flippa only has a rulebook to make buyers think rules exist.

There are no rules actively enforced on Flippa except the rule you better pay your bill. Traffic claims and revenue claims don't need evidence although the rules says they do. You can't claim potential revenue in the titles but it happens many times every day. You can't claim domain age from before the site was developed in its current form but it happens all the time. Sites with less than two months of revenue history aren't allowed to claim any revenue in their titles or descriptions but you'll find a ton of 60 day or less sites claiming with "proof" they made money. Some sites are a week old saying they made $500 in 7 days. All violations of Flippa rules but Flippa could care less.

Like I said earlier if you know the rules you'll find 70% of Flippa listings violate one rule or another; rules that were designed to protect buyers. That tells you just how serious Flippa is about protecting buyers.

That market sure is ripe for a real website auction that does enforce rules. Maybe we should from a group to look into making a good virtual real estate auction site.

Thanks everyone for such a comprehensive response. Definitely agree with the analysis I think the online world surely needs Flippa alternative. Its just amazing to see people thanking after getting scammed.

"A topical and fascinating site offered by an honest and expert seller who combined outstanding tech support with excellent communications. Would buy from him again"

"Great seller. He did more than I would ever expect in helping me solving my problem.Thank you very much!
"He was Awesome! to work with in getting domains and all files transferred. Very helpful with after purchase questions. Will do business with him again! Thanks"