The Flippa Implosion Continues - New Changes Coming Tomorrow

Nitros said:

Really wanted to read the whole post, but 1200 words written with white font on black background is just too much for my eyes

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I figured with a little touch up someone could start a blog with it

Like any successful business flippa is only trying increase its profits, and I 100% agree the best way to do that is to bring in more potential buyers which should also indirectly improve the sales of sellers.

1. The basic listing fee is now $29, so what? This affects every seller so actually makes no difference. Just increase your reserve or BIN by $10

2. Realistically the 4 hour window was a bit stupid. Imagine a buyer waiting to see if he's won an auction, then someone else goes and bids $5. He now has to bid again and wait another 4 hours. If it was upto me I would chose 5 minutes, that way anyone thats legitimately interested would know when it would roughly end. Proxy bidding should be a must.

If that visitor count on flippa is correct then the changes have made a positive impact as these days I'm regularly seeing 5000+ people online at one time. You can't compare that to this time 1 year ago. The changes have either made a dramatic change or flippa is investing more money into advertising.

Let's not forget flippa has all analytical data such as how many buyers, how many sellers, how much are buyers spending, how much are sellers spending. They probably have top notch marketing agents that have progression charts for every detail that you can think of.

I do disagree with some of there methods. I believe customer satisfaction is a must for both buyers and sellers and this should be something that Flippas marketing team should distill into every member of flippa.

All in all I believe flippa will be even bigger and better in the future. Flippa has buyers that I believe no other site will match anytime in the next 5 years.

Fathom said:

All in all I believe flippa will be even bigger and better in the future. Flippa has buyers that I believe no other site will match anytime in the next 5 years.

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Surely you jest. Flippa would like everyone to believe it would be almost impossible to compete with them. When you know the real data behind Flippa you'll realize just how vulnerable they are. There are many small auction websites which enough capital, technology, visitors and sellers to mop up Flippa almost overnight.

Listing and selling websites isn't rocket science and to think Flippa has grown enough to secure themselves as a niche leader for 5 years is bullocks.

Toke, toke, PASS, please.

P.S. About that visitors online number you see on their website. It's most likely a random number generator, not a true number of people online. You'll see it go from 6,000 to 2,000 to 4,000 in a couple minutes at times. It might be counting page hits by bots or some nonsense but it's certainly not a real online visitor counter. Like many other things on Flippa, it's a great illusion.

kvmcable said:

Surely you jest. Flippa would like everyone to believe it would be almost impossible to compete with them. When you know the real data behind Flippa you'll realize just how vulnerable they are. There are many small auction websites which enough capital, technology, visitors and sellers to mop up Flippa almost overnight.

Listing and selling websites isn't rocket science and to think Flippa has grown enough to secure themselves as a niche leader for 5 years is bullocks.

Toke, toke, PASS, please.

P.S. About that visitors online number you see on their website. It's most likely a random number generator, not a true number of people online. You'll see it go from 6,000 to 2,000 to 4,000 in a couple minutes at times. It might be counting page hits by bots or some nonsense but it's certainly not a real online visitor counter. Like many other things on Flippa, it's a great illusion.

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My last auction had 15 people watching and had 7 people ask questions.

If you feel someone can build a better site and garner all the buyers to the new site and be more successful than flippa then do it. I'll personally go with whatever works.

I'm a well experienced coder and I would love to take on a project like this but I just don't see it working.

Fathom said:

My last auction had 15 people watching and had 7 people ask questions.

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And that's great for you, my friend. But that's does not indicate anything about the strength of the underlying business or how the business has been performing on key metrics.

The number of live listings is down, the percentage of sites sold is down from near 60% to near 50%, the traffic is down whether you look at Alexa, compete.com or Google trends, the average selling price is down as indicated by the experienced-people.net marketwatch tool. Flippa is still the biggest marketplace of its kind but I wouldn't be surprised if they are having some quite stressful management meetings about how to recover from this decline. They might be able to, but it would be a mistake to consider them infallible.

As kvmcable says, with Flippa it's a lot about illusion and they are past masters are creating illusion to the point of being, arguably, deceitful in the stats and information they publish.

I listed a site for sale - my first time on flippa and only had around 50 hits for a 3 day auction. The bids went up to $250 but it was from only 4 potential buyers.
People search for sites based on its niche, among other things, and those would more likely be your potential bidders, even if the hits are not that high.
My first time experience was decent - this was 1 month ago. What you say in your title helps alot also.

I scan the Flippa listings regularly, not to buy websites but to get new ideas for new websites (the ones which have a hidden url are the most interesting ones ). Most of the listings raise my scam alert sensors though ...

Flippa is shit and has always been shitty, they even try charging money just for things that should be free (i.e removing a listing) and it's also filled with shitty sites that only idiots would buy, and the ones that might look good are usually just dying out and the person is just trying to get as much money as they can before their website sinks due to whatever reason. If someone had a good working business model and profitting site they wouldn't want to sell it unless they needed money, the site won't last much longer if people get easier and more convenient means of buying and selling websites, basically all these people talking about wanting to be a competitor should actually take action instead of just circle jerking in a forum thread about why flippa sucks, personally i have no intentions of selling nor buying a site, because to the sheer fact stats are usually fake in most of the listings anyways or there's usually whatever downfall to their business.

flippa is so shit then tell me whe meathead has made/sold over 1 million $
of sites over the last year ... shit lols

proxygo said:

flippa is so shit then tell me whe meathead has made/sold over 1 million $
of sites over the last year ...

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First, I don't believe he ever claimed he made 1 million $. He says he sold 1 million, it's not the same thing. As a broker, he sells on behalf of clients. If you started as a broker tomorrow and got one client selling a 1.5 million site, you'd beat his score.

Second, there is no way to verify the claims. I'm not saying he's lying - I believe him for one - but there could be several caveats. For example, sites he claims as sold may have achieved a BIN at Flippa, but how do you know the bidder paid? A large number of Flippa buyers do not complete the purchase i.e. NonPaying Bidders. There could be other catches.

Third, he's selling sites for a living. He has a company, partner, employees, offices etc. Even at a 10% commission - which he probably doesn't get on every sale - that makes $100K over the what, 2-3 years, 4 years? That's less than $50K a year in commission. If he, his partner, his employees etc., got paid a decent salary for all that effort, there was not a great deal of profit in the business.

I'm not knocking him. Very few people know what he knows about selling sites. To do what he has done in Flippa is to his credit, not Flippa's. What he has done is an even bigger deal than you think considering the poor opportunities in Flippa. If Flippa was a half decent marketplace he'd have done tens of millions of dollars in sales by now.

Your argument that someone sold 1 million so Flippa must be good doesn't hold water.

Yes Flippa is a huge money grab and they take more than they should, but look at it like this:

How many garbage websites do you see listed "buy it now for $150" competing with your actually valuable websites? A lot of people on Flippa aren't the most educated when it comes to websites so they go ahead and buy that cheap website and think it will do the trick. Flippa is trying to keep those websites away since they make less money from them, but it also helps those selling sites actually worth selling. Someone walking away with a cheap website could have been the buyer on your $20,000 sale.

Anyone that has a site worth selling wouldn't sell on Flipa anyway. They are like eBay, everyone wants stuff for nothing. I would use a broker if I was to sell a site. But you need a site that will fetch $50K or better before most brokers are interested. But it is not unusual to get 30 months profit +/- by using a broker. So about $1,600 or $1,700 per month profit.

tristangemus said:

Yes Flippa is a huge money grab and they take more than they should, but look at it like this:

How many garbage websites do you see listed "buy it now for $150" competing with your actually valuable websites? A lot of people on Flippa aren't the most educated when it comes to websites so they go ahead and buy that cheap website and think it will do the trick. Flippa is trying to keep those websites away since they make less money from them, but it also helps those selling sites actually worth selling. Someone walking away with a cheap website could have been the buyer on your $20,000 sale.

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Flippa may be trying to keep those $150 sites out which IMO is like them shooting themselves in the foot. Could you imagine a site like eBay saying that a product looks crap so I don't want people to list it?

I sell these cheap "garbage" websites myself that don't have revenue, but that doesn't mean the sites will never make money. All it takes is someone with passion and vision to turn a cheap site into something special. I have seen people purchase my sites and flip it for 5 x more than what they paid.

It is not these so called garbage sites that is putting people off of the higher end market. If all sites were sold with a guaranteed revenue then all it takes is 1 person to buy up all of the sites and watch his guaranteed profit mount up.

kvmcable said:

This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Flippa boasted of 2200+ running listings just last March. With that announcement they increased the minimum success fee from $5 to $10 on 75% of their inventory (listings under $200) saying it was an effort to get sellers to increase the quality of the websites they're listing. We all knew it was nothing but a money grab regardless of what excuse Flippa provided.

In May, Flippa saw the listings hadn't dropped significantly and introduced another price increase and this time it was significant. Increasing the listing fee from $19 to $29 sent shockwaves through their sellers. What could possibly be the reasoning behind a sudden 50% increase in listing fees? Again we heard from Flippa it's to reduce the number of low price, "template" websites and encourage sellers to create and list more valuable properties. Flippa continued with excuses for the 50% rate hike saying it was for site improvements that offered little benefit for the majority of their inventory. Andrew even appeared here and said with this additional revenue that Flippa would now offer weekend support for sellers. That hasn't happened. Support tickets from sellers are rarely, if ever, answered during the weekend. So once again, it appears this was nothing but another money grab by Flippa.

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This is exactly why there is still room to be the next Flippa in my opinion.

Being a seller and buyer on flippa. I think it is helping the buyer market instead of the seller. I have stop listing after I seen prices and sales drop.

You probably see more good quality sites ... but what about seller who give you $29x 2 everyday?

This is so true. I am thinking of opening my own branded small flippa websites.

I just Fuck this new 1 hour auction extension? We need a Flippa alternative.

What Flippa has not yet done is be the "middle man" between the buyer and seller. I know of one person who got scammed by a buyer from Flippa even though it was through escrow, he lost his domain and received nothing.

To avoid this I would recommend holding the domain during the transaction process to assure both the seller and buyer they won't get scammed.

Anyway JMO

I've been thinking more about this lately. Competitors have appeared before and never went anywhere... Like sitepaw.com for instance. Why is this? I believe it is a failure to market enough / market smart. How do you build enough critical mass out of the gate so it doesn't look dead and you gain adoption? I suppose with some creativity you could pad your listings and activity ;-). Maybe contests + media buys? You would need a pretty significant budget.