Start a website & domain sell/buy site

Hello everyone.
OK I have been on the internet a long time and I want to start a totally free flippa clone site.
I am looking for ideas for a great domain to add to my fully paid for busewe flippa clone with commercial license by: Ncrypted Demo here: http://www.ncrypted.net/busewe/enterprise-demo
I looked at the idea of using the new TLD's .bid I have bought some but not sure if they are good enough.
here is a list, tell me what you think?
CrazyDomainers.bid
CatchyDomains.bid
Catchy.bid
EZAction.bid
Flipit.bid
WnD.bid means: Websites n Domains

If you like any of these please help me pick it, or give me a new suggestion.
I will be getting the script customized and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I believe in helping others and that's why this site will never charge any money to anyone, also there will be no advertising on my site to annoy people when all they want to do is buy/sell. I have a very fast VPS so the volume of people won't be an issue, I will also be looking for people to help me with making this site successful.
So I am looking for your suggestions to make a great site for everyone, or any other suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

 

Starting the website, hosting and amending the script wont be difficult, though driving sellers is the tough call.
Flippa is simply the leader and nobody come close to this, but even 80% of websites listed on Flippa are pure junk.

Be prepared with high marketing budget for kickstart

 

I like the Flipit.bid domain and name. I believe the min obstacle is to get quality buyers to your new Flippa clone site. I would actually offer incentives to the buyers by offering some sort of discount when they purchase. Also, as far as Sellers go you can offer free listings initially and lower final value fees, etc. One other thing, give the sellers Front Page for much less than what Flippa charges, which is astronomical in my opinion.

Jinx

 

If you're trying to compete with an established website that is the leader in the niche, try digging deeper into the niche and offer specialized services for a niche market within the niche(Nicheception!).

Something liiiike....
Flippa for dating sites, ( kinda specific)
flippa for blogs about cats (specific)
flippa for blogs about cats with hats. (even more specific)

Get what I'm saying?

 

I will say everything is fine, whatever you want to do it, just do it.....
Dont be confused with lot of things. Select any domain which you feel is good, if you want to some perfection then just do little search on any niche Helge mention. But for you are taking action that is important. Whether that site sales or not whatever happen just dont quite.
First, Your success will provide you a big boost and motivation to move forward
Second, Your failure will teach you more about your business and again make you move forward with more strong foot hold.

Please take action do whatever you like it for your business and learn from there.

 

One problem that flippa has, is that it seems to be overrun with crap. If you were to have a premium one, where it is high fees to deter the rubbish, and you use 100% of those high fees to market the site to attract bidders. I imagine one where only $10k+ sites would be listed... something that facebook and google might even browse through....

Having a free one could work, but I just dont see how you will have enough capital for marketing costs. If you are going to earn commission, then thats ok. But just for fun, If you look through digitalpoint BST section, you will find many sites in the sub $100 section, and very rarely see anything in the $1000+ section, most likely if it is free to list, you will see alot of sites that DP has in the $10-$100 range.

One suggestion, is a better resolution process. Like if the buyer was to pay the final amount to you, and you personally oversee the domain, and file transfer process before forwarding the money to the seller. If you could do this, and charge a nice commission, it could work out well. But I also think that this can help attract buyers, as they will feel safer doing deals.
As for sellers, noone likes it when they waste their time listing, and the buyer doesnt pay. So if at the end of an auction, you dont mark the auction as SOLD!, but rather mark it as "PENDING PAYMENT", and if its not paid within 24hours (to your site) the auction just resumes. Then once everything is transferred to the buyer, you then pay the seller.
This little change completely gets rid of the non-paying bidder problem, as well as resolves any issue in the seller not sending the files.

For you choice of domains, I like flipit.bid, its short, but also easy to pronounce.

Please note that these types of sites are harder to market compared to a normal site, and it will be double the work. Like you need to attract sellers in order to have something before you can try to attract buyers and more people fail at these types of sites then succeed.

 

That's how most broker sites work, they typically only accept high value sites, check them to confirm stats and add listings on their sites.
Various site selling newsletters and site brokerage businesses also work in a similar way.

The problem with such approach is getting the initial traction to get a "critical mass" of buyers and sellers to get it going initially. Additionally how would you make it more attractive for site sellers than flippa, which have a much bigger reach?

These are good suggestions though, flippa can definitely improve by applying some of it, however there are always issues with such measures. E.g. for bigger sites you can't always expect payment to be delivered within a day. The whole process would always take longer. What if the buyer just went away for a weekend? or travelling, or waiting for funds to transfer between accounts?

Ultimately I think the main question for a marketplace to answer is how you get sellers of quality sites to list in there?

 

Thank you all for your excellent input and I will be considering taking onboard most of the advice you have all given me, I will be strongly looking at making the site so that a buyer pays us directly and then we notify the seller that he has paid us, and when the buyer has taken possession of the goods we then pay the seller the money directly for a small 2% fee of the sale price! but with a 100% guarantee of a perfect transaction with no scams at all.

We are also implementing lots more ideas, as we have started to install codes so we can have (Apps listed to buy/sell) on the site by next week.
The site has been installed with the domain http://flipit.bid

Thank you, and I will try and open the site within 4-6 weeks.

 

yeah you're right, a couple of times I have deferred payment until payday, but maybe someone could look into the implications of a smaller holding deposit.
Flippa does force credit card verification for bids, so that reduces some of the bad bids, and for me, I would be happy to signup and agree to a small holding deposit to be autocharged instantly at the end of the auction (say $5-$20) -> I dont know if others would agree with that, I cant think of any solution that is 100% win-win, and I guess you dont want to deter real buyers.

Perhaps something where sellers have the option to automatically accept bids from everyone except for:
1- from bidders who havent done credit card authentication?
2- from people who have not set up "instant deposit if auction won"
This way the sellers have more authority, and a buyer that has no feedback can be better trusted if they have done the the authentication process and setup instant deposit. This also means that buyers can still bid, but their bids have to be manually accepted by the seller.

Sounds great!

 

Yes I like that idea about a deposit, I will implement a 10% deposit after the sale of listing and they will have 24hours to pay, so that if the deposit was not received by 24hours the sale would automacilly reopen and get relisted free of charge, and the buyer will be automatically banned for 14 days for the first time, the second time permanently banned for life. So when auction/sale has ended we will display an icon displaying (PENDING PAYMENT) then once payment has been received a large icon will appear with the a (SOLD) sign on the listing.

Yes I will also look into that idea as well.

Thank you Matt.

 

Hi Jinx
Thank you for your feedback and opinions they are of great help to me, and to know what people are looking for.
I will be looking into to see if I can do something for discounts, I was thinking about doing something like this: (The first 100 listing totally free including free front page listing) for the first 100 sellers but only 1 listing per customer.

My thought on the cost for front page listing to be $10 and $2 for any additional extras like Bold, Highlight ect.
Also the cost of a 100% guaranteed transaction where no scamming is possible I will charge a flat fee of $20.

To add your listing is free and there will be a charge of 2% of the sale price at the end.

How does that sound to you?

 

That's basically how flippa's "accept bids from most buyers" feature work (I suspect).

Personally I've found it's best to exchange some messages with top bidders before allowing them to win the auction, if they don't have any previous transactions history.

It sounds completely ridiculous, but sometimes people win an auction and when it's time to pay they either disappear, or say something like "oh I just wanted to see how high it can go, I don't really have any money", or "sorry I changed my mind, bought another site". What the heck? But, that's how it is, most people who are just doing this first time and don't really know exactly what they are doing just get caught up in the moment and and may not even be serious about buying.
The best way to prevent this is probably through stricter checks and verifications prior to allowing people to place significant bids (say even above $500) - to explain them that auctions are legally binding, they can be sued (not really, but technically it's possible) and also banning people after they don't follow through the sale and not allowing them to just register a new account easily - unfortunately flippa usually doesn't do that last one.

 

FlipIt.bid is the best out of the list. W/ that said, a site competing against "Flip"a.com w/ a flippa clone...come on. No offense, but it already sounds like a hack.

Now off the topic...

I've spoken to the guys at flippa quite a few times (on more personal notes), and I'll tell you one thing. Getting sellers is not the hard part. It's getting buyers w/ the cash to put down (granted it goes hand in hand). It's taken flippa years and LOTS of cash to reach out to the buyers w/ deeper pockets to drive sellers (vise-versa) to the site. A lot to take on...

Any platform that is 100% free is always appreciated, but you are shooting yourself in the foot. If you think Flippa is flooded w/ scammers, shillers, etc., just wait and see what your site will be reduced to w/o listing/success fees. They are in place not only for profits. Flippa still doesn't have it right.

You're already thinking wayyyy to in depth w/ the listing features. No one will buy/sell a good on your site until there is/are an established sales record on the site. I'd consider building the site to sell your own personal goods and see what comes of it, before marketing it out. I've come across dozens of Flippa clones sites that sound exactly like yours, and they are all dead.

Again, no offense. But there's no reason I'd sell a site/domain at your site, over Flippa or even the DP marketplace...it's gonna take a lot of time + money. Not to be discouraging ....like Helge said, niche it + simplify it as much as possible. Don't market it as "The Free Flippa Alternative", because "free", won't buy you squat...and in all honestly, Flippa really isn't expensive enough to justify a free alternative.

 

Firstly no offence taken as any criticism is good feedback for me.
To answer you, I didn't want a Flippa clone but it's the core codes I needed to run a site that sells websites and domains, because I will be doing extensive custom changes so it will look nothing like Flippa, but I needed the running of it.

As far as getting crap buyers or sellers on my site won't happen as I am taking several steps to stop that from happening, I will have phone verification and/or credit card verification, also a 10% deposit must be paid instantly after winning the bid and/or full payment made.

If a person registers on the the site they must pass the verification process with phone or credit card or registration won't finish.
RingCapcha will send a 4 digit code to their phone and verify the code to end the registration process.

Sellers will have the choice to accept PayPal or do an internal process payment when making their listing, if they select internal payment to be done where we will receive the payment from the buyer, we then notify the seller who well then do the turn over transaction and once the seller has received the goods we will pay the seller the money.

Our selling point is: Flipit is 100% SCAM PROOF GUARANTEED.

 

Can't remember, but doesn't flippa already use phone verification for registration? There latest flush of "scammers" a few months back looked to be primarily a "manual action". The problem when managing people who are too smart for their own good , if there's a will, there's a way lol.

You have to think, if Flippa hasn't perfected the system yet, there must be a reason...w/in their grasp, or out...

 

I agree that the flipit.bid one is one of the best. The "crazy" names might through people off. They might not understand what you're trying to achieve.

 

Hi sweatpea69.
My phone verification will happen once they want to buy/sell then they must do a verification, on registration there is email verify, and PayPal account verification process, so if they put the wrong/false PayPal email they will be rejected and can't register until they supply original PayPal account, because this PayPal verify checks with the name and address provided at register, if they don't match then registration can't continue.

So before anyone can even bid or sell they must pass a 2 step verification process as mentioned above.

Then when they go through registration and they are registered before they can bid or start selling they must do a phone verification process, so as you can see it will not be easy to scam anything on my site, because we have a safe and strict verifications process setup.

 

Hi boostsoftware.

Yes I agree and flipit.bid is already up and running, but not ready for traffic yet, lots more to do.
Thank you for your response.

 

I don't like .bid period. The internet is just not use to it yet. FlipIt.bid sounds pretty cool. However the term flipit is a less attractive term for the buyer.