General Tips On How To Properly Buy Or Sell A Website

Let's take an example, .........Paypal in its early years. You are the owner and want to see if you can get a good price for it. You list on DP, get nothing and keep the site.

Your site is now one of the biggest in the world and when someone does a search they see your 'for sale' threads in all search results.

Any serious and professional website owner/developer would not want to see 'site for sale' search results in any search engine.

 

You can use an image like this:



You can even host the image.

 

It is better to host the image yourself so you can remove it once you are done.
And my office blocks images from photobucket.com, youtube.com and so on.
So I cannot see the image you were trying to show , (i know it is not your fault, but it is a good reason to host the image yourself).

FFMG

 

This needed to be stickied. Good Call!

 

Yeah there are far too many ways to hide the URL from SEs while allowing potential buyers to see what they're buying.

I've seen FAR too many sales thread where the starting bid is like $200 and They want you to bump their thread requesting a PM for the URL....

Look here's the bottom line... the only reason that's even close to being legitimate to not show the URL in a thread is if it's a high profile site. Unfortunately though whether you post it in the thread (cloaked) or send it via PMs people are going to know either way. All you're doing is flooding the forum with spam "please pm me the URL" posts for no reason.

Another excuse I see all the time is it keeps the tire kickers from wasting my time.... Guess what.. if you just post a tinyurl redirect to the URL you'll never waste your precious time sending PMs to tire kickers.

So the high profile site excuse doesn't fly. Even if it did that would still mean we need to stop these people selling turnkey stolen sites from getting free bumps asking for the URL so it still shouldn't be a free for all...

 

Thanks for the answer Rian. Actually, I tried to edit my post before anyone could quote my question because I didn't read every post before asking. I ended up answering my own question after I posted it by reading every post in the thread. I won't be so ignorant before asking questions in the future.

-boxer126

 

I could understand why someone would not want to allow the URL, what if they want their website sale to remain private from their website readers / users?

 

Thanks Dekker - a nice concise thread which will be of great use.

 

yeah it's very helpful for begineers good stuff

 

Im glad this thread got stickied.

 

Excellent topic.

As for the URL, I have seen webmaster using services like tinyurl for such purposes.

 

You could use a redirect from another site, (if you own more than one).
Once the sell is complete you can remove the redirect.

tinyURL and the likes, (http://urlkick.com, ), will keep the link for a long time and that might not be ideal.

FFMG

 

Excellent contribution.
One very important thing to remember as a buyer is that you should treat an offer to purchase just like handing a person at the counter your credit card. You hand over the money like you're supposed to immediately after the details are all sorted out. Then, if something goes wrong you still have 30 days to work it out... A bid is serious, and you shouldn't make one if you aren't going to follow through with it. Sometimes this is the reason sellers need to start a new thread all over again, or move to another forum... A troublesome buyer makes things very hard for the seller afterwards.

 

& the number one tip on buying/selling a site?

use sitepoint

 

certainly helpful guidelines... and nice to have them as a sticky.

 

As a question for everyone, if you bought a site that had a custom script and a custom design, and the owner gave you "full rights." Do you think that that previous owner still has the right then to resell the script???

Why would you say that? I've bought many sites and only had problems with one sale and it was at SitePoint.

 

Yes because on SitePoint if a scammer is selling a site and anyone questions it the scammer can delete their posts....

Any more wisdom?

 

will surely use ur uselful info...thankx

 

George, i've wondered about that SitePoint feature myself. I've seen some key critical comments come through via email only to go to look at the sale online and see the comments have disappeared. Seems there should be a better way to handle spam.

m