I’m a pretty avid watcher of the website sales at SitePoint and Digital Point. I’ve written about my experiences at these two sites before as a matter of fact.

Recently, over the course of the last few months, as the economy has taken a nosedive I’ve seen a similar drop in the number of quality sites being listed and sold at these sites. You can take a quick look yourself and see that people on SitePoint and DP that are selling anything are more or less pushing spammy junk for cheap prices. It’s a rare occurrence when something good comes along and when it does it isn’t on the market for long before someone snatches it up.

Finding Good Sites For Sale

Since the people normally involved in the buying and selling of websites trade are slowing down their activity it’s time for people looking to buy in this market to get proactive.

If you’re looking to buy a real, quality web site you should no longer be looking on SitePoint and Digital Point with any hopes of success. Instead, go out and find sites you like and contact them directly and ask if they’d be willing to sell.

You might be surprised to discover not only the number of people willing to sell their site to you but their asking prices as well. I certainly recommend giving it a shot and seeing how things go. The worst thing that can happen is someone says no.

UPDATE: GrabUp has been sold at the “Buy It Now” price of $20,000 USD. That’s actually half of what the initial buyout price was, but the seller cut it in half to speed up the sale.

When is it too soon to sell a site? A lot of people worry about waiting too long to sell their websites. They’re concerned if they don’t strike while the iron is hot, and cash in on recent revenue stats, that they might not make the most possible from the sale of their sites.

An Example of Selling Too Soon?

There’s a great Mac-only piece of software out there called GrabUp that lets you quickly take snapshots of your screen and upload them to the web for you to share with others. The program is snappy and the system for uploading is extremely fast and efficient. It’s a great product that just recently launched an extended version that, for a small cost, lets you get even more out of the software. The future looks bright for GrabUp.

That future, unfortunately, is going to belong to someone other than the program’s creator.

GrabUp is currently up for sale over at SitePoint. This sale comes only one week after the “pro” version of the software has been available. In that week the profit has been $1,060. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at and the owner is using that figure to justify their “Buy It Now” price.

It feels to me like the seller might be rushing into this one a bit. I obviously don’t know, or pretend to know, their financial situation of course. But with sales figures like that so early in the game, with little promotion from what the seller is claiming, it seems like they’d be better served holding on for at least a few more months.

Here’s the other problem with selling so fast. It makes potential buyers skeptical. You immediately ask yourself, when first seeing this sale, “Why is he selling already? What’s the problem?” If you do a little research, you find out GrabUp has actually been up for sale before and then the deal was cancelled. That’s going to raise concern as well.

Software is a tricky game to play. I know that from experience working at the enterprise level. It’s just as hard at the consumer level, of course. But when you have an apparent hit on your hands it might be best to stick to it and see where it leads you. As opposed to jumping ship for your next project at the first sight of a payday.

Last month I said I didn’t have a lot of faith in the accuracy of eBay’s statistics for their affiliate program.

A big problem myself and other affiliates within the program saw was a serious decrease in the amount of ACRUs our sites were getting. eBay continuously denied their was a problem.

Well, guess what? We were right and eBay was wrong.

From the eBay Partner Network blog comes a post, on July 3rd during the news vacuum of the Fourth of July holiday here in America:

As we mentioned on the discussion boards, we’ve identified an issue affecting the way ACRUs were being attributed to affiliates. Although on the eBay Partner Network we use the same underlying tracking system as on Commission Junction (Value Click’s MediaPlex), when we switched to the eBay Partner Network a small issue was introduced where in certain circumstances ACRUs were not credited to the right affiliate. Many but not all of our affiliates were affected.

So there you go. At least they’ve admitted their mistake and are starting to make amends. The bad part of this mess is that they’ve denied there was a problem since the program launched even though all of their affiliates knew something wasn’t working right with the ACRU tracking.

Since the recent switch from Commission Junction to an in-house affiliate program my stats on my eBay auction sites have gone in the tank. I’ll be the first to admit that my eBay sites don’t see a lot of traffic but before the switch I was seeing regular levels of clicks and sales.

Since the switch my stats are all over the place. One day I’ll have no clicks at all and then the next I’ll have 70+ on one site seemingly at random. The next day we’re back to no clicks.

I’ve read in a lot of other places that people are not happy with the numbers they’re seeing as well. They’ve reported this to eBay and have basically been told they’re wrong and that everything is going just fine. One of the big points of argument with affiliates seems to be the number of new signups they’re seeing. It just so happens new signups are one of the biggest money makers for affiliates but I’m sure this sudden drop is just a coincidence…

My eBay revenue was so small to begin with that I’m probably in no position to really argue but some of the bigger players in this field feel something is amiss. When enough people start to see smoke there probably is a fire.

I’ve been waiting to write this post for a very long time.

Some of you might remember that I put my auction aggregator up for sale back on the 15th of February. I decided to list the site on the SitePoint Marketplace to see what kind of reaction it would get. I promised I’d give a recap when the site was sold and even though the sale only ran for seven days the site wasn’t officially sold and transferred completely to the new owner until March 31st.

It took me nearly six weeks to sell my site.

The Auction

The act of listing my site at SitePoint cost $20 and was a pretty painless process. I should note that I did all of this before their recent updates to the Marketplace so I can’t say one way or the other if the experience is any better.

Within about 15 minutes of posting my auction bids started to come in. In about two hours my (apparently very low) reserve was met and things just continued to escalate. At the end of the seven days it had basically boiled down to a three-man race for the site with the eventual auction winner taking it for a last minute bid of $900.

Sealing The Deal

Now that the site was “sold” the fun really began. The initial winner of the auction was pretty clearly in over his head. I suspected as much from his questions he asked during the seven day listing but he wasn’t in the running late so I didn’t think much of it. Until he made an 11th hour bid that won the site.

We went back and forth via private messaging at SitePoint about transferring the site. Then one day all communication just stopped completely. The winner had gone AWOL on me so now I was left with a finished auction and no buyer.

Reserve Champion

In the show cattle industry the second place winner is called Reserve Champion. Well, I decided that after my first buyer vanished I should contact the second place bidder and see if they were interested. Luckily for me they still were and even at the first winner’s final bid of $900.

And then this “winner” disappeared from the face of the earth as well. Once again I was back to where I started about three weeks after I listed my site for sale.

Finally, We Have A Winner

I was on SitePoint trying to contact the third place bidder (whom I would eventually find out no longer was interested) when I received a message from someone interested in buying the site if it was still available.

This buyer was not only interested in the site but he was committed to actually seeing the transaction through. What a pleasant change of pace for once.

I won’t disclose what the buyer paid but I will say it was less than what the site went for at SitePoint. After a week or so of sorting out some technical issues the site is now running smoothly for its new owner. And that’s the end of my experience with the SitePoint Marketplace.

If anyone reading has had a similar experience I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment about it.