There are many marketplaces and websites you can use to sell the website you’ve spent time building or which you’ve acquired and made more valuable. Some of them are so new that they may be younger than your business. They have their advantages (some are large and very visible) and disadvantages (no vetting or markers of reliability), but rather than focus on those, in this article we’ll talk about eight reasons you should sell your website to us.
Speed
Traditional businesses can (and often do) take months to sell, and some sites and brokers emulate that timeline for website sales. They reason that buying a website should be like buying a brick and mortar business and ignore the technology that questions such thinking. We don’t believe in such a long timeline. The overwhelming majority of our businesses sell in just a few days, and some even on the same day. The same sort of velocity prevails in our buying transactions. When it’s time to sell your business, speed matters for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that you’re free to move on to the next thing you’d like to do, instead of the sale taking one moment longer than it needs to.
Experience
Michael has done hundreds of transactions worth millions of dollars, and thus knows not only what he is looking for in a website, but how to deal with everyone from a first-time seller to professional sellers (and everyone in between). Experience means that the likelihood of mistakes in the transaction goes way down. It also means that he’ll have answers to your questions or has the network to get you an answer if it’s something he might not know.
Trust and Feedback
We are now in a world in which we think nothing of publicly rating the home of a person we just stayed in, a meal we just ate, or a ride we just took in a stranger’s car. These transactions are far less important than the sale of your website, and yet you will often consult ratings before renting a home or hotel room, going to a restaurant, or even while waiting for your driver to arrive. Selling your website should be no different, and in the case of Domain Magnate, we have a 100% Flippa rating across dozens of transactions of varying sizes. We don’t have one way we interact with a “large” transaction and another way we do so with a small acquisition. We treat each buyer and seller with respect and transparency. A 100% rating is not easy to get or maintain, and should give you every indication of the safety of your transactions with us.
Process
We do not have a long checklist of due diligence items you’ll need to obtain for us, which can be frustrating and difficult to put together and in the long run, are ultimately irrelevant. A checklist is only as good as what is on the list, and again, this is an emulation of traditional business brokering of brick and mortar businesses. Instead of using a checklist, we believe in verifying certain fundamentals: revenue, operating expenses, stability of a business and its niche (making sure it’s not a fad: think Pokemon Go!), and the most recent trajectory of our business. If these metrics are to our satisfaction, we move forward in a timely manner.
Payment
We use trusted means of payment like escrow.com. You’ll never find us asking you to accept payment from suspicious or unusual sources.
Validation
We represent serious investors who demand serious returns and as such we don’t have time to simply browse or window shop businesses. If we are making you an offer it’s because we think you’ve got a site worth buying and we take your time as seriously as we take our own. Even if you don’t end up working with us, an offer from us means that you have something of true value.
Professionalism
You may have already explored some other means of selling your business and have gotten emails and even phone calls from so-called “serious buyers” who asked you seemingly endless questions but then never followed up when you took the time to answer them. Or worse, after those interactions, you found out that they were just lookers with no actual money to buy. Our record and reputation speak for themselves. We do this for a living and have been doing so since the very early days of the market for small and medium-sized website sales.
Helpfulness
On more than one occasion we’ve come back to buy a business that didn’t originally match our buying criteria. In these cases a seller took our advice about how the site could be improved or the valuation could be increased and came back to us after doing what we said. These situations are instructive because it illustrates the win/win for both parties when honesty and humility can meet. Honesty from us – we told the seller what we liked, didn’t like, and what we think could be improved (again, from the perspective of our significant experience) and humility from the seller – he/she had a willingness to listen to some hard truths, the thoughtfulness to implement some or all of our suggestions, and the follow-through to come back with a better, more valuable asset to sell.
As we noted above, there are many options you can use to sell your website. We happen to be one of the most experienced and focused buyers out there. Contact us to see if we are a good fit for a transaction, and if not, trust that we will, in good faith, share some tips for a great fit for you with someone we know, or some ideas on how to make your site even more valuable.
Trying to figure that out.