Web Ladder – Websites for sale blog
Buying and selling websites
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Hi all,
This week I sold a site using Escrow.com for the first time. For those who don’t know what escrow is and how to use it, here is a small explanation.
First of all what is escrow?
Escrow is a service that offers you protection when you buying or selling products. It is designed especially for virtual products like domain names or websites. Unlike paypal, they take care of the transaction, so if something goes wrong, both parties (seller or buyer) have a protection.
For example let’s say you want to buy a website. You contact the seller and you agreed on a price. Now here come the tricky part. You need to transfer him the money before the seller transfer you the domain. If you are using paypal you take a risk. You can send him the money and he can disappear without transfer you the domain. Paypal will do nothing about it, no mater how much you will complain. They will response that they don’t take responsibility for virtual transactions. Believe me, I tried 
It is not that bad if you sent $40 for a service and you never got it. But if you send $2000 and the seller is gone with the money, you $ucked.
So if you are sending more than $200, use escrow.
How to work with escrow?
I have to admit that I had a lot of luck with my transaction. I wrongly used the system and I was in risk to lose my site and not to get the money. Why? Because I didn’t follow the procedures…
So let me save you some time. Here is the right way to do it:
1) The buyer login to escrow and open a new event. He/She sets the terms and conditions.
2) The seller will get an email asks them to login to their account (or to create one, if they don’t have) and accept the terms and conditions.
3) The buyer will have to pay using credit card or other method. Then Escrow will ask the buyer to send a fax to confirm the identity of the card holder. Once the buyer do it, the seller will get an email asking to login again to the account.
4) In their account the seller should choose the domain registration company, and send a request to transfer the domain.
5) Escrow will check if the domain has been transferred to the new owner and will send to the seller the money.
If for some reason the domain hasn’t been transferred the buyer will get the money back.
Now for the seller here is a very improtant tip: Don’t ever transfer the domain before you get a confirmation that the buyer has paid. Otherwise you are risking loosing your site. The buyer can pull out and cancel the transaction, and you will lose your site.
Hope it makes it clear 
Assaf
Hi all,
What I like with Sitepoint is that they are always tried to improve things, and they are listening to what the users have to say. This is great! And I wish more websites will do so.
I read today in a blog that Digital point forum is better place to your site for selling. I couldn’t disagree more. With DP you just feel lost. Hundreds of posts per day give a great traffic, but you can never track what is going on there. Which one you are bidding, and who where is your site there. In Sitepoint it is much easier to get your fingers with what’s going on.
But Sitepoint has their own problems which they try to fix. The biggest problem is that biddings are not binding. You can place a bid and doing nothing with that. The reputation system can help, but it will not solve the problem.
Another thing that I would like to see change is the interface. Long lists of websites just create confusion. The Internet was taking off with Yahoo directory, because they had categories. This makes life easier for searchers. Then Google took over and the ‘keyword’ is the king. I would like to see both of them. For example search PR5 sites under sport websites. Easy!
Sitepoint says that they are going to add more info per URL like PR and Alexa rating. I do hope that we will be able to search for them.
The more I think of it, the more points I have. I’m sure the good people at SP don’t need me to tell them what to do. But I am envy them that they are in the middle of the process of improving things and create better platform. I wish I could help
Have a nice weekend,
Assaf
Hi all,It is not that I am lazy writing… it is just I am very busy lately. Many projects and deadlines etc…
And although I follow the market I didn’t get much involved.
I bought 3 sites:
www.streetbuzzmedia.com
www.thearttree.net
www.basb.org
I also bought www.uaud.com and sold it with a nice profit two weeks after. It was just bargain. PR5 directory for $250… It is not the real value I didn’t want to sell it, but I reaching a point where I have too many directories, so it is hard to follow and give them the right attention.
Now I am selling www.voice-msg.com here:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=358729
Again it is a case of no time. I built this website, and I love it, but it has to go. I just don’t have the time to promote it.
As you can see I am focusing on directories these days. If you know what you are doing they can be very profitable.
Ok, I am off for a short holiday, but I promise to write more!
Assaf
Yes I guess every blog will have this post. Long time since I was writing…
The fact is that I was busy with other things and couldn’t find any website that I want to buy. So I was quiet for a while. Today I bought a new website, but I will give more details about it as soon as we will close the deal.
As you can see there are some changes on this website:
I have added a search engine that tracks auctions and websites for sale ads, so you can search and find easily what you need.
I do hope you like the design, and I will love to hear you comments.
Have a nice weekend!
Hello all,
Some websites are really do everything in order to keep you a way from their website.
I found this forum for buying and selling websites. It is not a busy one, but I though to give it a chance. Most of the posts don’t give you information at all. Anyway I posted this message to one of the post:
Hi,
Can you pm me the details please?
Thanks
One minute latter I got a private message – that is quick I thought… but it was a warning!
You have received a warning at Webmaster Forums.
Reason:
——-
classified posts
Piss off! I won’t visit again for sure…
Hello all,
I am following the websites for sale market for 4 years now. When I created and owned Sitebazaar I monitored Google’s rank for keywords like:
- websites for sale
- buy websites
- sell websites
And more… For years websitebroker was the top website on Google list. I can imagine that they have thousands of unique visitors a day. But still I never bought from them any website or listed one for sale. And I tried…
It seems to me that they got it wrong. You get limited information about the websites. When you try to contact the seller you don’t get any response. The design is awful, and it seems like nothing really is happening over there.
3 days ago I revisited and I saw that they added a RSS feed. I am huge fun of RSS because it gives me at glance what is new. I’m using netvibes to track my feeds and it is great. So I’ve added their feed and till now I didn’t see any valuable website for sale.
It is a shame, because for long time they could be the market leader and they wasted it. Now Sitepoint are number 1 for the very competitive keyword “website for sale”. Well, they deserve it.
Assaf
Hi all,
I know that I keep say sitepoint, sitepoint and sitepoint… because they are the best website for buying and selling websites. There are serious buyer and serious seller over there with serious money. I think they should upgrade their system and offer more tools (like a good search!) if they want to keep their status.
But there is another vibrate place to buy and sell websites: Digital point it is mainly for small sites that sell under $1000. There is no insert fees, so its free to publish an ad and it works like a forum. Meaning that any comment will jump the post to the top (unlike sitepoint). So you get a busy forum which is hard to keep track of what is going on.
But on the other hand sometimes there are some interesting stuff there and you can find bargains. It is a mess over there, but I like it. It gives you the impression that a lot of small deals are going on, and there is a true feeling of a real market.
It is by far less sophisticated then Sitepoint, and it lacks some necessary tools, but it has one tool that I like: I-trader where you can rate the person you dealt with – something that SP promised to add.
Have a nice weekend,
Assaf
Hello all,
When you are dealing with websites for sale you have to be quick. Sometimes you have to decide in minutes if you are going to buy the website or not. If you won’t, someone else will do it.
And when this situation happens? When someone put a bin (buy it now) price too low. Then you know that if you will not offer the bin price, someone else will do.
Last week I was waiting for a phone call. I had 10 free minutes. So I browse in Digital point forums. Usually I don’t. There is a lot of crap over there, but sometime you can find a gem for cheap. And I did found one.
“For sale PR7 domain” starting bid $100 Bin $1000
Immediately I sent him a pm (private message) asking which domain he is selling. He answered with Conita.com a quick check on iwebtool.com confirm this information. It has PR7. Even more then that: 2 Google’s data center said it has PR8. Great.
The website itself had nothing on it. Only one page saying something about new technology for mobile phone. Another quick search on Google confirmed that this company is not longer running. Someone got their domain and he is selling it. Now I had to check that the person who sells this domain is the same person on the record on ‘whois’. It was. I put a bid to buy this domain and paid. All this happened in less then 10 minutes.
Then moved the site to my server and installed a directory on it. After two days I put it for sale on Sitepoint.
Now it became really interesting. I thought that I can sell it for $4000 which will leave me with nice profit. But I was impressed by the professionalism of the members in Sitepoint forum. They do their research well. It started good. I got a private offer to sell it for $2500. I was greedy and refused. I thought I can get more.
I took a lunch break and went to cut my hair. I checked on my mobile and saw this message:
Hi all,
Conita is a US registered trademark. This is what the trademark search throws up. So watch out before buying anything:
Word Mark CONITA
Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer software for communications management, namely, telephony interfaces, speech recognition interfaces and PVA communication channels in a telecommunications network; computer software development tools, namely, compiler programs, debugger programs and utility programs for developing other computer programs for communications management; and instruction manuals supplied as a unit therewith. FIRST USE: 20000211. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20000211
Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING
Design Search Code
Serial Number 75894397
Filing Date January 11, 2000
Current Filing Basis 1A
Original Filing Basis 1B
Published for Opposition April 3, 2001
Registration Number 2565887
Registration Date April 30, 2002
Owner (REGISTRANT) Conita Technologies, Inc. CORPORATION SOUTH CAROLINA 1200 Main Street Suite 900 Columbia SOUTH CAROLINA 29201
Assignment Recorded ASSIGNMENT RECORDED
That’s it I thought. To be honest my first reaction was to go back home and delete this message as soon as possible. But when I cooled myself, I thought this actually good. Now all the cards will be on the table. In fact it triggered a very interesting topic. And I still got bids for it so I was happy.
In the end I sold it for $2150 a profit of $1150 in a week and 30 minutes work. I need to find more websites for sale like that
Good luck,
Assaf
Hi All,
I think it is not a secret that sitpoint market place is the leading place for buying and selling websites. There are serious sellers and buyers over there, and everyday many deals closing there.
It started as a forum and not long ago they improved the system to ‘mini auction’ website. Why do I say mini? Although there are auctions and many bids it lacks of some basic functions:
- Feedback – It is so important when you buy a website from a seller to know his past record. A simple rating system (yes like ebay) will give bidders more confidence when they bid high. For example if I am bidding for a 10k website and I can see that the seller sold 3 websites without any problem, it will give me a sign that I can trust this person. This is so important, and I don’t why they don’t add it.
- Get rid of another 4 hours when someone bid. Basically the way it works is that if there are less then 4 hours till the end of the auction, and someone bid, it push the end time by another 4 hours. Sitepoint says that this function is to prevent buyers outbid in the last minute. And I thought this is the main idea if an auction… It creates a strange situation that if you want a website you can lose it only because of time difference. I am bidding in UK and it is 20:00, I don’t mind to stay a wake till midnight. But if some one will bid at 23:00 it pushes the end time to 3:00am it worth to wait for a good website, but what will happen if someone bid at 2:00am? I have to wait till 6:00… and so on and so on… just get rid of this. It doesn’t help anyone.
- It will be nice to have a page where you can track all your bids and activities. And see how many watchers your auction has.
I know that it sounds like Ebay – but it works so well there, so why not to copy?
I would love to hear your opinion.
Have a nice weekend,
Assaf
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