Buying websites for profit
Buying websites for profit looks like a private market, but most of it is published. The marketplaces state their fees, their vetting criteria and the multiples they achieve, and the whole check a buyer runs is knowable in advance. Here is what those published numbers say, where the traps sit, and what a seller should have ready.
Two markets, not one
There are two ends to this market and they behave very differently. Flippa, the volume end, states that it completes more than 12,000 deals a year and carries more than 400,000 weekly active buyers. Empire Flippers, the curated end, publishes a running scoreboard: 2,664 businesses sold, just under $600 million of total sale volume, and an average time to sale of 125 days.
The difference matters to a seller more than to a buyer. At the volume end you list and compete. At the curated end you are vetted before you list, and a large part of what you are buying with the commission is that a buyer takes your numbers seriously because somebody else already checked them.
How the price gets set
Online businesses are priced on a multiple of monthly profit, not annual, which trips up anyone arriving from conventional M&A. Empire Flippers states the formula openly: the average net profit over the trailing six to twelve months, multiplied by a figure that typically runs from 20 to more than 60. A 30 multiple is therefore about two and a half times annual profit.
The same firm publishes what it actually achieved, calculated as sale price divided by average monthly net profit over the trailing twelve months. Those numbers are the most useful public benchmark in this market, because they are outcomes rather than asking prices.
Empire Flippers average sale multiples, trailing twelve months
Distressed is defined there as anything that sold at 20 times or less, and it usually reflects a recent problem such as a loss of traffic or a lost revenue line. Read that table as a seller and the arithmetic is stark. On £4,000 of monthly profit, the gap between the distressed band and the typical band is around £48,000. Very little of that gap is about the quality of the business. Most of it is about whether the numbers can be proved quickly and whether anything recent scared the buyer.
Larger and more established businesses cross over into conventional valuation. Empire Flippers notes that seller discretionary earnings suits businesses up to around $5 million of annual revenue, and that above that buyers move to EBITDA, because the business is no longer owner-operated and an excessive owner salary has to be normalised against what a manager would cost.
What the platforms charge
Fee structures tell you who each platform is really working for. Both of the big marketplaces charge the seller on success, which aligns them with closing rather than with listing, and both sell access or convenience to the buyer.
What the platforms charge
The Empire Flippers commission is blended, so the rates stack rather than replacing each other. Flippa refunds fees paid if it cannot match the business with a buyer at the right price, which is a meaningful signal that it declines listings. Acquire.com inverts the model entirely and charges the buyer for membership, bundling in legal, diligence and closing tools.
For a seller the read is simple. Nobody makes money listing you. They make money closing you, which means the packaging work they do at the front is real, and the reason they refuse listings is that an unverifiable business wastes their time as well as yours.
The check before the check
Before a buyer ever sees a listing, the marketplace has run the first pass. Flippa publishes its fit criteria plainly: twelve months of consistent monthly net profit, a minimum two year trading history, and twelve months of financials with a profit and loss statement supported by an accounting platform, bank statements or revenue records. Empire Flippers reviews every submission before publishing and asks for more if the vetting needs it.
Empire Flippers also hides the URL on most listings. The stated reason is protecting the eventual buyer from copycats who would otherwise spin up a competitor in the same niche before the deal even closes. That single policy tells you what kind of asset this is. The thing being sold is often a position, and a position can be attacked.
The consequence for a seller is that failing the marketplace check is invisible. You do not get rejected by buyers. You never meet any.
What a buyer actually checks
A competent buyer runs roughly the same sequence every time, and every item on it is a place where an unprepared seller loses either price or the deal.
The algorithm question deserves its own paragraph because it is the one buyers get wrong most often. Google states that it makes significant, broad changes to search several times a year, that core updates are not aimed at individual sites, and that anyone assessing a traffic drop should wait at least a full week after an update finishes rolling out before comparing periods in Search Console. Google also warns against quick fixes. The buyer implication is that a site which fell during an update is not necessarily recoverable on any timetable you can plan around, and the seller implication is that a recent dip needs explaining with data rather than reassurance.
Where the traps are
That last one is the UK specific trap, and it is the one where an online buyer with no conventional M&A background gets hurt. A share purchase and an asset purchase have different tax consequences, different warranty positions and different consequences for employees under the Transfer of Undertakings regulations. Decide which one you are doing before you agree a headline price, because the two numbers are not comparable.
What a seller can do to survive the check
Everything above is checkable in advance, which means it can be prepared in advance. The sequence below assumes a year, but every step is worth doing even compressed.
That last point is not cosmetic. Coldstream Capital Partners names slow response times as one of the five most common reasons a business sale collapses during diligence, alongside inaccurate data and late disclosure. That finding comes from conventional company sales, but it applies without modification at forty thousand pounds as much as at four million. The buyer cannot inspect how well you run things. They can only watch how fast you answer.