When you get into buying and selling websites it’s really a big game. I’ve sold several websites now. I’ve been window shopping websites for the longest time. I’ve been watching how much they are getting sold for and figuring out why they got sold for the ending price. I’ve been learning what’s a deal and what’s not a deal. I’ve made mistakes selling websites. I usually start websites from scratch, but I found a website that had a pretty cool script that was selling for $15 so I picked it up. Whether you are on the buying end or the selling end, you can leave a deal feeling like you did’t get your money’s worth.
I personally believe, building websites just to sell them is a waste of time. I can make more money selling products online and spend a lot less time turning a much larger profit. Some people do very well at buying and selling websites.
Most websites sell for the amount of money that they will make in a year. Personally, it would be hard for me to get rid of a website that is making a descent profit. If I sold it, I know I could make what ever I sold it for in about a years time. Some people sell sites that are making a profit because they have a bigger project they need to fund or maybe they lost interest in the site. All the websites I sold were websites that I lost interest in. They were’nt really making any money. I broke even on one. I made a profit on one. And I lost money on my most recent sale.
The part that gets sticky is when you sell a site and find that the person you sold it to is selling it for way more than what you sold it for. Or you buy a site and find out you could of ended up with the finished product for half the price. One site I sold for about for a small price I see the new owner selling for over double what I sold it to them for. This person changed the site over to an Amazon site this way the new owner doesn’t have to deal with buying and selling products. Should I get mad? No, if I did the same thing my site probably would have been worth the amount this person is now selling it for. I’ve been finding when you go to buy a website, especially in forums, that it is hard to find sites that are selling tangible products. This is because selling tangible products is much more work. People are more willing to buy sites where they promote them and get checks for refferels and so on then to have to deal with customers.
Now, on the buying end. I just bought this site for $15. All I really wanted was the script. After I purchased the site, I found the script for sale at $2. Should I get mad at the seller? No, the site was sold at a fair price. I learned if I ever buy a site that is based on a script that I should check to see if I can find a similar script for sale and see how much the script costs before purchasing it. I knew this nugget of wisdom before I bought the site, it didn’t occur to me until I already bought it.
The moral of my whole story is don’t hate the player, hate the game. Think through every purchase or sell you make. There is no reason to be upset with the seller or buyer when they are trying to win in the game of buying and selling websites just like you.
