So You Wanna Buy My Website?

Posted: 22 Nov 2012 09:11 AM PST

Pretty much once a month I receive an email from someone claiming to be interested in purchasing one of my websites. While I am not looking to sell any of them I obviously won’t turn down an offer with the right price, so usually I reply to those emails.

First of all the emails I get go like this:

Hi,

I represent company XYZ, and we are interested in purchasing your website. Please let me know how much it earns per month and how many unique visitors it receives, and we’ll make you an offer.

Best regards,
John Doe

Most of the time there’s no link to the company website, and sometimes the person is even using a free email service, which doesn’t help a bit. Either way here’s my usual reply:

Hi John Doe,

While I am not looking to sell the site, I am willing to discuss, and if the offer is right we might be able to do business.

Before I reveal any data, however, I would like to know your budget and what multiple of monthly earnings you guys pay, just to make sure we are on the same ballpark.

Best,
Daniel

Around 80% of the people never reply to my email. I guess those are the scam artists who were looking for a clueless site owner.

Out of the 20% who reply the vast majority say they are willing to pay from 10 to 12 times monthly earnings. In other words, a joke (i.e., 12x monthly earnings is a terribly low multiple). At this point I know I just wasted my time.

Once in a while someone will offer a more decent multiple, like 20x or even 24x, but those are still too low for me to sell.

I did sell four websites or so over the past couple of years, but all the deals were done via people in my network, website brokers or Flippa.com.

Bottom line: always be skeptical about people approaching you out of the blue wanting to buy your website. Ask a lot of questions and perform your due diligence to make sure you’ll not get scammed or sell for too low.