Your guide to buying a website
So you are in the market, you have decided buying a website is the way to go. This area of the site is about helping you through the selection and purchase process, and ensuring you are aware of the risks, potential pitfalls as well as the opportunity and great rewards involved. Follow our website buying process and read the supporting information to help ensure a good outcome:
1. What are your online objectives?
Before starting, set some criteria, set some objectives. What do you want to achieve? Write these all down so you can revisit them. Consider answering some of the questions below as you set out your objectives. If you have not decided whether to buy or build yet, read our buy or build website page for help:
- Why are you doing this? To make money? Too much spare time on your hands? To get online experience?
- What should the website be about? What are your interests and hobbies?
- Is it for business or a personal objective?
- Will you manage it or will someone else? What resources and time are available?
- What type of website are you looking for? E-commerce, Forum or content based?
- Whats your budget?
- What value can you add, if any to an existing website?
Read our website trading tips to help you navigate through process and ensure you manage your exposure and risk when trying to buy or negotiating the purchase of a website.
2. Find and do some preliminary research
Browse our listings or search and find sites that meet some or all of these criteria. Keep in mind websites are constantly coming up for sale, so while you may not find exactly what you are looking for today, if you've set sound objectives, your patenice will be rewarded. Once you've found something that interests you:
- Visit the site and navigate around, check that it works without errors
- Read the detail provided by the seller in the listing
- Check the contact details and about-us section of the website to ensure it matches with what is being listed for sale
- Check the Whois data and ensure it matches with what is listed. Use the tool below from Domaintools to see if the domain is registered and to check the who is data and that it agrees with what is listed.
- Check how many pages are indexed in Google using the site command (site:www.domain.com.au) in the Google search box
- Check the number of backlinks using the link operator (link:www.domain.com) in the Google search box or alternatively try Yahoo Site Explorer for a listing of all links
- Visit the wayback machine to check on the sites history, if it is available
- Check search results and see what rankings the site has, if any if any, this should be done in Google as a minimum, given Googles market share of search
- Create a shortlist of websites that meet your criteria. Good websites will trade quickly, if you spend a long time analyzing, chances are you will miss the opportunity!
Remember to use our website trading checklist to assist with this process.
3. Start discussions
Contact the owner, be courteous yet firm and start dialogue about the website:
- Introduce yourself
- Ask the questions you have, before doing so and make sure the answers are not already provided in the listing or on the website
- Decide on what you are prepared to pay, based on the data available. If you are not sure check out website valuation page
- If you cannot get the answers you want or the seller is unable of unwilling to verify any details, be careful. Keep in mind however a popular site will attract numerous buyers and the owners may be overwhelmed with emails. A phone call is a simple way to deal with this.
- Be clear on any additional information to be included such as customer names, newsletter emails and agreements with suppliers. Read our buying website checklist for help.
- Negotiate and agree on a final price
- Work out how you will make the payment, get the website and any other relevant terms and conditions between buyer and seller
- Get an agreement in place between the buyer (you) and seller
4. Buy the site and transfer
Read more on transferring a website to a new owner. This is the risky part, ensuring you get what was advertised and what is paid for.
Depending on the selling party you may approach this differently. You are less lightly to have any issues with a corporate entity selling a site, especially one with a known physical address. Just make sure you have a signed agreement before paying. When dealing with someone on the other side of the world with no proper address you may be a little more carefull.
If you want to make a return on investment (ROI) on your purchase, make sure you put the effort into running the site and keeping existing customers and subscribers as well as planning how to enhance theri experience and get more what you have bought. Good luck with your purchase.
In case you havent already, start browsing our website listings here.
