Were You Just Flippa’d Off?

In a tough economy, it is more important than ever to make sure every customer feels valued. Money is tight and the majority of buyers (and sellers) will migrate to where they will recieve the best value for their hard earned money. Unfortunately, Sitepoint’s announcment, and automatic transfer of their marketplace to Flippa.com, has tossed these values right out the window.

To sum it up, as both a regular seller and buyer on Sitepoint, this move has been disasterous. It’s obvious from talk, posts, and tweets around the net that I am not alone in thinking this way either. Most have been irked from the moment the announcement was made, and the reaction from Sitepoint owners and management has done absolutely NOTHING to make most of us regulars feel any better about the move. The reason for the move was supposedly because their marketplace had “outgrown its tab”. I find this highly unlikely. That “tab” was generating tens of thousands of dollars monthly for them!

It seems ego and complete unprofessionalism are more Sitepoint’s style these days. When confronted with hundreds of comments and complaints about not only the impending move, but the total lack of warning about that move occured, SitePoint co-founder, Mark Harbottles’ response is nothing short of appalling:

Our buyers aren’t going anywhere. They are savvy business people. They don’t care about the design of the site or the fact the logo sucks (the current logo is a placeholder BTW), they simply get on with the business of buying, and we’ve made it a lot easier for them to do that on flippa.com.

Meanwhile while you all whine and complain about the fees, the design, etc. the smart sellers are listing their sites on flippa.com and they are attracting the majority of the buyer interest. They will also get the added benefit of the PR we’re about to roll out.

So, it’s totally up to you! If you want to come across to flippa and sell your site in the professional marketplace we’re creating for serious buyers, we welcome you with open arms. If not, please do go to digitalpoint. List your site for free and see if the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies.

A Summary of The Flippa Flop:

• The name is ridiculous and unprofessional. It leads one to believe that it’s all about “flipping for profit”, and not targeting the revenue potential of owning a piece of web property long term.
• The new fee structure is nothing less than greedy. Their previous plan lined their pockets more than adequately for the service provided. There was no need to add a 5% success fee, when NO additional services are offered nor provided, to justify that fee.

  I asked @sitepointmatt about this fee. Here is the conversation:

  sitepointmatt @Lukevdp GreatDomains, AfterNIC, Sedo.com, etc. all take a _MUCH_ higher success fee…

  iBlogaholic @sitepointmatt Sedo etc act as intermediaries – you dont. Whats the justification for list fee + success fee except for greed?

  sitepointmatt @iBlogaholic Sedo charges 10% for successful sales through its marketplace. If they get involved in escrow, it’s an additional percentage.

  iBlogaholic @sitepointmatt Granted yes, but, it’s also free to list at Sedo – Flippa wont be.

  sitepointmatt @iBlogaholic We could go free, but then we’d be like eBay’s Internet Businesses category with 30K junk listings per month

  @sitepointmatt $19 is reasonable. 5% for no extras is not. it’s extortion (metaphorically). I KNOW I’m not the only one saying this either

• The lack of warning about the move was inconsiderate! An announcement by Andrew on June 11th, stated it would be “very soon”, but no date was ever provided. A little post was made on their developement blog June 22nd, giving only hours notice. The result was hundreds of unaware people thinking their browser had been hijacked!
• The Flippa site itself is horrible to navigate! Why would anyone want to pay for a featured listing? It appears on the homepage only, and once someone clicks on “Buy A Website”, it is never seen again. Featured and Ending Soon listings also fall well below the fold of their homepage, most likely missed by 90% of their traffic.

  The ‘at a glance’ capabilities are so difficult to use, I don’t even want to get into them. It would be a whole post in itself. You truly have to go and play over there to see what I am referring to. Consider your normal search habits and you will see what I mean. Here is one small sample though of what I am referring to…This is the Latest Auctions tab on their homepage. As you can see, dates are all mixed in, and the default is listing end time…



Flippa's Latest Auctions

• The new “rules” do absolutely nothing to encourage sellers to build a solid legitimate business. They are geared towards Flippa greed only.

  For example:
  – Private offers outside the system “expressly forbidden”, including listing in more than 1 place

  – “Users may not link to certain categories of external site. These include: Pages which could be classified as self-promotion, such as pages affiliated with the user” – this means no more list building, a huge downfall for many

  And my favorite:

  Flippa’s Role
  Flippa does not enter into monetary transactions or business dealings between marketplace buyers and sellers. Flippa is a neutral facilitator only, and will not be responsible for the failure of either party to follow through with their obligations, agreed or otherwise. The content of a marketplace listing is the responsibility of the respective sellers including compliance with all laws and not engaging in misleading and/or deceptive conduct and therefore Flippa is not liable for any violations of rights of a third party, in particular intellectual property rights, trade mark rights, and copyright resulting from a marketplace listing. Flippa reserves the right to remove any listing, bid, offer or comment from the system at its own discretion.

  In other words, apart from verifying a telephone number, that can be obtained by anyone with a $20 buck pre-paid phone, they do nothing to justify the increased pricing and success fee.

• Mark states that “savvy business people…don’t care about the design of the site or the fact the logo sucks”, but on a quick scan of comments around the net, I found no less than 5 places where he states he is “very much looking forward to replacing the ugly placeholder logo with something more permanent.” Come on Mark – who gives a WHOOT what the logo looks like!! Your logo doesn’t provide functionality – the old Sitepoint Marketplace did…
• A quick glance at Flippa at the time of this posting reveals absolutely no sites listed in the Start Up section so far today. Normally there would have been close to a dozen by this time. The Established section has 1 added, and there is nothing new in the Premium section.

What Sitepoint/Flippa seems to forget is that without sellers listing products and services, they will be out of business. Trust lost in the way they have handled this move, and the utter inability to listen to what their customers are telling them, is going to be the downfall of a once fabulous place to do business.