Selling my e-com site

[Happy Monday]

I have a lovely online store selling maternity products, baby clothing, gifts and toys. I also have a lot of beautiful stock. Unfortunately I'm just not able to put in as much time and effort as I would like. Any ideas where I might advertise the business for sale? I really just want to sell the stock, but would happily hand over the website and systems to anyone interested.
All ideas welcome!

 

[Hahnbeck]

There are quite liquid markets for e-commerce businesses (if profitable). The two most prominent marketplaces are Flippa and Empire Flippers (I can't post the links, but just Google them). Flippa takes a commission of 12-15%, Empire Flippers 15%. This is high, but they provide escrow services and help with security, which is useful if you’re selling to a buyer in a different country (which can be feasible with some online businesses – in your case perhaps not if you hold the stock yourself). Both have a closing rate of >90%, meaning that more than 90% of businesses listed for sale on the site, actually sell. Traditional business brokers charge a lower percentage than Flippa / Empire Flippers, but their closing rates are typically closer to 10%, and they have minimum fees typically in the low thousands of pounds (some as high as £45,000 minimum fee). And none of the UK-based ones specialise in e-commerce businesses so they would not be able to find a buyer any more effectively than you could yourself.

This is the other option of course: sell the business (or just the stock if that is your intention), yourself. Think about who would benefit most from the opportunity to take over your business (or stock), and contact them. I’m sure you have competitors that you already know, and you could easily expand this list by searching for others. Once you have one party interested, work quickly to find at least one more, in order to create a degree of urgency so they don’t delay forever, and to achieve a higher price. You will be much better at describing the quality of your stock than a broker would, and you will achieve a better result and a higher sale price.

 

[Clinton]

Wow, I'm going to disagree big time with @Hahnbeck.

Flippa is a junk marketplace for low end crap and for scammers looking to skim some money off wannabe entrepreneurs. I've used Flippa since before the Flippa.com domain was registered (the marketplace was at Sitepoint before that),I know the owners, I have had numerous discussions with owners / managers of Flippa and have watched Flippa grow from a small time scam market to a big time one.

Along the way I, and my forum members, tried to get Flippa to play properly, but we failed. Try this search for Flippa related threads on my forum. We have hundreds of threads about scams at Flippa ... and about the BS stats that Flippa publish ( to try and make their platform appear more successful than it is).

90% "closing rates"?! My @rse!

And they help with security? No, they pretend to help with security which is a lot more dangerous than not helping at all. We've also discussed their "verified Analytics" and "Verified Adsense" nonsense and explained the con on our forums.

Long story short, the OP would do well to avoid Flippa.

And I don't know what research you've done but there are plenty of brokers who specialise in ecommerce businesses. For example, FE International. It's owned by a good friend of mine ...and someone who used to run the FlippingPlanet.com forum which I eventually took over from him some years ago and merged with mine (the OP can drop me a PM with your email address if you want an intro to the MD, Thomas Smale. Or just get rid of the stock in eBay, boot sales etc).

There are others who know what they are doing in the ecommerce space. I like to think I know a bit or two myself OK, who am I kidding, I'm one of the world's top experts on the sale of online businesses, but I'm fully booked up at present and can't take a small business like this on. There's not enough meat in it for me.

£45K?! Wow! The likes of BCMS and Blue Box charge those prices, but they don't take on micro businesses like these! The circa £45K fee is for businesses generating many, many millions of pounds. (I cover broker fees here)

 

[Hahnbeck]

@Clinton just wanted to clarify.

90% closing rates – this is verifiable on each marketplace (Empire Flippers regularly updates their latest data). Do you have published evidence to the contrary? It would be great to see it.

RE: Flippa security problems, your information appears to be out of date, this is a historical issue (the same was said of Ebay in the early days), albeit a very important one. Empire Flippers has not been reported to have the same issues. Both are worth considering. Regarding the idea that they are only for “low end” businesses, it just isn’t true either. A quick check on Flippa will show that in the last 2 months the highest price paid for a business on the site was $450,000. Many have sold for more than $50,000 in the last few months.

FE International is a US-based broker with a UK office, but fair point. The same issues with brokers apply.

You mentioned BCMS which is a coincidence as I have first-hand experience with them. They approached me regarding the sale of a business (which at the time was turning over less than £1m) and they wanted to proceed, with the standard fee structure, £45k up-front plus commission.

 

[Clinton]

Hi Hahnbeck, BCMS is not a coincidence. I have detailed fee (and fee structure) information for hundreds of brokers in the UK, and the UK's largest knowledge base on business brokers, so the £45K figure you quoted seemed like a BCMS number hence my mentioning that name.

I don't know how/why you got approached by them, but they don't normally deal in sub £1m businesses.

FEInternational Ltd is a UK regd business (regn 07526350) . They setup an office in the US because there are more sellers of websites in the US than the UK. More recently they've been claiming on their website that the US office is their HQ. But it's a UK business. I know the founder well, he's been a long standing member of my forum and we've done business together.

Yes, I do have extensive stats on Flippa's fiddles. I posted some of it in my forum but don't have time to go dig the posts out for you today.

You are correct in that some larger value websites do occasionally sell on Flippa, but after a long bot exercise scraping data on all Flippa activity over a long period of time I believe the average sale price came out at under $1K (though they did used to have fake numbers on the home page claiming "$x of completed deals in the last week" till I blew open the fact they were fiddling the figures they were publishing every week.)

I posted stats on average sale prices as well on my forum some while back together with proof of shill bidding, users having multiple accounts to aid and abet shill bidding - which Flippa was turning a blind eye to - and lots of other stuff. My recommendation is AVOID Flippa. There's always been a whiff of crooked about them and there are hundreds of threads on my forum where users have given their own take on Flippa!

I know the blokes at Empire Flippers well, too. I trust them a lot more than the people at Flippa. Justin and Joe always seemed like decent chaps.

 

[antropy]

How about post a link to the website?

 

[cswykes]

businessesforsale.co.uk
What is the size of the business? Turnover? send a link to a domain - maybe we can help?