Website flipping is getting more and more popular with hundreds of websites trading everyday. You may have heard of Flippa, an online marketplace for website auction. As far as I know, Flippa is the most active online buying and selling platform for website transactions.

I have been involved in website flipping about three years ago with some pretty good results but has since stopped to focus on my training business. Recently want to sell a new website and I though to use Flippa as it is gaining popularity and many Buyers are there looking for good deals as well. Hence I decided to use Flippa and sell the site that was generating around US$31 through Adsense advertisement (totally passive, no maintenance effort) for the month of Aug 2010. The price I have in mind is US$300.

5 Days Flippa Listing Ended Without Sales

I created a 5 -day listing with Flippa and paid the listing fee of $19 (yes, Flippa is not a free listing site). Either me or the buyer needs to pay (or co-share) a 5% success fee if the site sells successfully. At the end of 5 days, I received about 230 views with 8 people watching the auction. The highest bid (out of 6 bids) I received is $170. I didn’t want to sell for that price as I know that this value is well below the market.

I went on to list the site at some popular webmasters forums as those forums were my main cashflow for selling sites three years ago but I am not sure if Buyers still frequent them as often. I decided to try it out.

Site was SOLD within 48 hrs After Listing In Forums

I did not went to ALL the webmasters forums because my past experience tells me that only 3 forums are worth trying out. Thus, I put up a listing with the EXACT description in Flippa. You can see one of the forum listing over here at DNForum.

The forums I used are all free to list (except DNForum where you got to be a platinum member to post) and there are no success fee involved. Within 24 hours I received more than 5 offers from the range of $50 all the way up to $250. I was waiting for someone to place the BIN (Buy-It-Now) – $300 as I see that there is room to negotiate base on the messages the bidders are sending me.

The BIN comes through to me in DigitalPoint Forum where someone offers to pay $300 for the site immediately just after 24 hours. I accepted the BIN and wait until the payment is cleared before I close the listing.

Takeaway – Consider forums if you are selling small to moderate sites

I still believe Flippa is a good platform for buying and selling sites especially for bigger websites where transactions exceeds $1,000. Below that range, I would still prefer to use forums for quick and easy sales. I hope that this short case study would be able to help you increase the exposure to your website listing when it comes.

I would love to hear your comments if you have sold websites before in Flippa or forums.