New Feature: Clearance Rates & Average Sale Prices
Posted on March 16th, 2010 by Luke Moulton
We love stats, and it seems our members do too. Over the last couple of months we’ve received numerous requests for more marketplace stats; more metrics that will help you understand where the opportunities lay in the Flippa website marketplace. So the propeller heads in the Flippa dev team have rolled out a very handy new tags report page that adds listing clearance rates and average sale price.
Why Is This Report So Useful?
For website sellers and flippers, I’m sure it’s immediately evident you can use this report to help you decide what niche you’re going to focus on next. If you know what’s selling and generating reasonable returns, then there’s a little more certainty that the website you build will sell on Flippa.
And it’ll help you get your tags right. Check out these two tags which mean basically the same thing:


Guess what? You use the automated blog tag, your listing is only 48% likely to sell, whereas autoblog is 75% likely. It’s not a guarantee, but it does show taking a few minutes to get your tags right could bump that site up to a good sale.
For website investors, the report may help you find lower competition niches that have traditionally fetched high prices. Take the education tag for example:

There are 8 open listings, 11 closed, 0 buyers watching this tag, a 73% clearance rate and an average sale price of $5,704. Might be worth checking out the education tagged listings to see what’s on offer there?
Subscribe to Tags
Although this functionality isn’t new, I thought I’d just remind you that you can subscribe to receive notifications about sites tagged with a particular term. If you’re registered and logged in to Flippa, you’ll be able to click on the little
icon to receive regular email notification. Once you’ve discovered a tag that you’d like to keep tabs on, just click that icon and we’ll keep you updated.
Comments (16)
Comments are closed.

March 16, 2010 - 1:30 pm
Finally! Yes! I’m so HAPPY! I’ve been asking for this for months and it’s finally here! Thank you Luke and the Flippa team! You guys rock!
(off to analyze keywords for our next flip, and blog about it!)
- Ian
March 16, 2010 - 1:32 pm
Is it possible to make the columns sortable OR let me download a .csv file?
(it’s still awesome!)
- Ian
March 16, 2010 - 1:33 pm
Ian,
The columns are sortable – check the “Sort” listing at the top of the page.
March 16, 2010 - 2:13 pm
Hey guys…great to see you’re giving us more stats – keep them coming! However, I have some questions and suggestions…
The “Closed” column doesn’t make sense because it includes Open listings. Closed should only include auctions that are no longer active. Am I missing something?
I’m assuming the Clearance number then ignores the Closed listings. In other words, it’s not correct to assume that I can take the Clearance number and times that by the Closed number to get the number of actual solds for that tag, correct?
How often are these stats updated and what time period do they cover?
Now for my suggestions…it would be way more helpful to have four columns: Active(Open), Sold, Unsold, and Total Listings for Tag. Then have the Clearance number actually reflect the % of Solds of the Total Listings.
It would also be helpful to have a time stamp or something on the table to indicate when it was last updated and what date range the data covers.
The obvious next step would be to have this data retrievable by date. For example, I could see the data results for a given 3 month period.
Finally, you guys should create a list of required tags a seller must select from. These would be things like WordPress, AdSense, Ecommerce, etc. You require sellers to choose from these first. Then have an optional second-tier level of tags that the seller can enter anything they want to further classify their listing. By doing this, you help both buyers and sellers and you improve the stats. Right now you allow sellers to enter any tags they want. This doesn’t help anyone and creates a bit of a mess.
Travis
March 16, 2010 - 2:45 pm
Travis,
“The “Closed” column doesn’t make sense because it includes Open listings.”
Nope, Closed is only those listings which have finished, either sold or unsold.
“…it’s not correct to assume that I can take the Clearance number and times that by the Closed number to get the number of actual solds for that tag, correct?”
No, in fact you can do exactly that.
“How often are these stats updated and what time period do they cover?”
They’re up-to-the-minute, from forever.
March 16, 2010 - 6:29 pm
Awesome stuff guys! I’ve already done some quick analysis and it’s pretty revealing. Thanks for the up-to-the-minute stats, love it!
March 17, 2010 - 12:15 am
Good stuff! I was aware of the top 3 tags, but it is even better to know all the other popular tags. Thanks guys!
March 17, 2010 - 1:14 am
Dave:
Maybe I’m just clueless and don’t understand how to read the table, but when I go to the tags table and look at the WordPress tag row and hover my cursor over the Closed number, I get this message:
See the 1297 current and past listings which have used this tag.
The key word there is CURRENT. And if I click on the Closed number, the 119 Open listings for the WordPress tag are indeed listed as part of the total 1297 Closed listings. I’m not trying to be difficult here but what am I missing?
Travis
March 17, 2010 - 9:34 am
Travis,
When you click through, you’ll see that the number at the top of the search actually says (1-30 of 1452). The number in the hover text is definitely wrong, thanks, we’ll fix that today, but the number on the page definitely doesn’t include the open listings. (There’s also a discrepancy between the open+closed numbers and the total shown by the search – we’ll look at that today as well.)
March 17, 2010 - 5:07 am
Forgive my poor maths, but on the WordPress tag there are 1283 closed auctions out of which 72% sold. That’s 923 sold. That row also says there were 23 buyers. So buyers bought, on average, 40 sites each? (923/23)
March 17, 2010 - 7:47 am
The buyers column lists home many people have subscribed to watch a tag – it’s intended to indicate the interest in a particular tag. We’ll try to make this clearer.
March 17, 2010 - 7:39 pm
Let me help you: “Watchers”
March 17, 2010 - 9:46 am
Hey guys …
I’m very new to “flippin” sites but I can see the power of all this extra data straight off! Thanks … Michael
March 17, 2010 - 3:10 pm
Awesome stats! Keep this coming…love this so much it got my fingers itching. I retweet it and did a couple bids.
One request though. Get rid of the link that show the listing history of a site. I’m not sure it works to the advantage of a site flipper.
Again, good job!
March 17, 2010 - 3:38 pm
Brilliant new feature! This should be handy for those who are looking for what is selling for what, and what is not. Cheers!
July 24, 2010 - 9:43 am
I am now constantly making use of it. Thanks for the heads up. It helps with choosing niches to develop for sale.