Gary Sieling

New tool explores Flippa seller history and facilitates due diligence

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.

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