Thanks for all your feedback on the Flippa.com beta!

Overall the feedback has been constructive. It’s funny how the positive feedback tends to come in privately over email, but the negative feedback on the other hand always happens in public and inevitably spawns more…

Anyway, rest assured we are taking all of your comments very seriously none the less. In fact just on that, we have some exciting news to announce on our fee structure based on your feedback…

First a quick background on our fee structure.

As you know we have set our listing fee to $19 and introduced a new 5% success fee based on the sale price of the site (capped at $499). Many buyers and sellers requested this new structure the last survey we did of marketplace users. Whilst some sellers were totally for this, others were against it, feeling like it was pricing them out of the market.

Anyway, long story short, we’ve come up with a slight twist that we hope pleases everyone…

THE SELLER WILL GET TO CHOOSE WHO PAYS THE 5% SUCCESS FEE.

As the seller you will be presented with 3 options when you list your site for sale:

1. Buyer pays the 5% fee.
2. Seller pays the 5% fee.
3 The fee is split 50/50 between the buyer and seller (2.5% each).

The seller is now in total control of the success fee. Option one will see the buyer pay the fee, which is one way to screen out time wasters and be sure that you’re likely to be dealing with a serious bidder. Option two will mean the seller pays the success fee, therefore removing all friction for buyers.  And there’s a middle ground, which of course comes with the benefits of both.

Buyers Remember: You control the market.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t really affect buyers all that much. If you’re a buyer and you have $300 to spend on a site, and the seller asks you to pay the success fee, then simply price it into your bid.  You should never pay more than you’re prepared to spend in total, and you should always take the success fee into account in that. In the end the sellers will decide who pays the fees and the buyers will decide what sites they bid on and how much they pay.

Everyone wins when the market decides!