Clinton, owner of Experienced-People.net, released a new data analysis tool to explore Flippa auction history, available at http://stats.experienced-people.net/seller.php. Flippa is one of the largest marketplaces for websites for sale- this tool allows detailed research on sellers to facilitate due diligence and market research.
One of the most fascinating part of browsing Flippa listings, for me, is to read the descriptions of websites that sell for large sums (note when I say large, I mean $x,000- $x0,000). Auction listings often expose interesting details about a business, but often missing is the seller’s back story. Interesting auctions include failed startups, high risk SEO plays, or a successful but languishing SaaS products. Often the differences are apparent, but Clinton’s tool lets you research this from a different perspective, namely to find the business model of a seller, as well as other user’s with whom they may have a relationship.
A common question from buyers is whether a seller will go off to compete with them. It’s fairly obvious that some sellers will sell the same site week after week, and we can easily find specific examples of that. Searching for sellers with more than 300 successful listings, shows this:
| SmartBusiness | 862 | 194822 | 194822 | 859 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Sun Shine | 943 | 166599 | 161777 | 773 | 96 | 3 | 166 |
| shawn.website | 524 | 106009 | 102474 | 450 | 27 | 0 | 59 |
| JoeWebHog | 947 | 97638 | 70171 | 474 | 160 | 0 | 480 |
| diwi | 426 | 91579 | 88439 | 379 | 17 | 0 | 36 |
| 5RDesign | 487 | 68135 | 64554 | 386 | 42 | 0 | 103 |
| deana | 533 | 65270 | 59792 | 411 | 51 | 0 | 74 |
| Instant Websites For Sale | 539 | 62451 | 56252 | 418 | 23 | 1 | 69 |
Drilling into one of these (diwi) shows the seller’s location, domains sold, and IP addresses of listings, revealing favorite vendors (e.g. in this case, hostgator and sedo). The domain list shows that this user has sold many similar domains, presumably based on keyword lists generated by a tool. For this user, these sell an average of $230/listing- for that price, someone really has to churn out sites really quickly to remain in business.
* 86. BestRecipeFinder.com
* 87. BestRecipesDaily.com
* 88. BestRecipesFinder.com
* 89. BestRecipesFree.com
* 90. BestRecipesPortal.com
* 91. BestRecipesWorld.com
We can also find out who the high-end brokers are, if we search by highest value of goods sold:
| WeBrokr.com | 39 | 10969114 | 4464864 | 13 | 1 | 0 | 14 |
| Latona’s | 133 | 5439565 | 4802397 | 5 | 70 | 0 | 80 |
| stevetp | 11 | 2299735 | 2299735 | 7 | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| dhermansen | 18 | 1905870 | 1895770 | 8 | 8 | 0 | 9 |
| Flipping Enterprises | 71 | 1794212 | 1660912 | 39 | 26 | 0 | 8 |
Drilling into Latona’s, as expected, we see a much smaller number of unrelated domains, with a vastly higher value per sale (around $40k), e.g:
* 4. allgamesfree.com
* 5. allgamesfree.com
* 6. AllInsuranceInfo.org
* 7. AllInsuranceInfo.org
* 8. BestInsurance.com
* 9. bestloanmodificationcompanyreviews.com
* 10. Blogia.com
* 11. brainybetty.com
* 12. buycarinsurancetoday.com
* 13. cancerinsuranceinfo.com
* 14. carforums.net
While still rough around the edges, this tool has interesting potential, beyond what is covered here, including finding sellers who use Flippa to generate traffic to their sites, finding out what hosting companies are most popular, and working out who would make valuable industry contacts.
Thanks for the mention, Gary.
>>A common question from buyers is whether a seller will go off to compete with them.
Hmm. This is an interesting angle and one I hadn’t considered. Well spotted!
A seller who regularly sells mini-sites in a particular industry is obviously one you want to steer clear of as his business model involves creating competition for you. It’s difficult enough getting a new business off the ground without a dozen other spookily similar businesses in the same niche all fighting with you for a limited pool of customers.
Yeah, agreed. It seems like it should be fairly obvious many times that these types of sellers will compete with you, but there are gray areas, and I’ve seen people ask it in questions on listings, so it certainly seems worth noting. Thanks for taking the time to comment!