Does the world need a better Flippa?

I would say someone that can actually vet sellers and what they are presenting for sale with some accuracy. I would be willing to actually pay some money for something like this.

There are good sellers on that platform, but I've ran across too many people trying to just scam buyers and being able to make a new account not too long after the fact. I have personally fell pray to this when I was new to the game and have never trusted Flippa since.

enjoyed one of their promotions to re-list my domain/auction for free... innovative thinking


-have a special day

the million-dollar question is how will you be getting buyers to the platform/site

also, what measures would be in place to ensure there is not shill bidding or manipulation

The world definitely need a batter alternative then Flippa.
1. You can make the analytics/earning report mandatory but in the end you can't really check if the stats are all real, the buyer need always to do diligence.
2. Flippa never checked anything, they let the buyer and seller sort it out. You can implement it like escrow maybe, with milestone, the seller list all the properties and credentials and the buyer need to check everything before releasing the funds.
3. Flippa doesn't even reply to emails, they for sure won't help you to operate the properties. Maybe you can add a support specific to the hosting section, if the website is with epik you'll handle everything.

Sent you a PM

Domain name investment community needs a cheaper and more efficient domain name auction.

Not a website brokerage service.

We will see a 1% commission hand selected domain name auction sooner or later. It will be a game changer.

Untill then, we are stuck with 9%, 15% or even 25% solutions.

Can you afford to pay 25% commission?

Website brokerage is outside of the scope of domain name investment industry.

Rob Monster said:

A discussion on NamePros about selling domains has raised the question about whether the world needs an alternative to Flippa for selling entire websites.

Click to expand...

I see that epik offers escrow and has very good feedback online.

I am curious to know how epik would handle the following scenario that I am dealing with.

Currently on Flippa a buyer refused to release Escrow funds held by FIippa for a domain/website that he fully received from me.
He made completely weird reasons why he wouldn't..

I was planning to just ask him to return everything and cancel the deal.
The I discovered that this cretin had taken the website offline and replaced it with a sale page. Yes, I'm not kidding.
He won't release escrow, but is trying to sell it RIGHT NOW.

Flippa's stance is that i should just get the domain/website back. But I already asked for the buyer to unlock the domain and instead he listed it for sale and sent another bs message to me.

My stance is is that this buyer is a sneaky jerk and that he should be both banned and funds released since he removed the entire website which impacts rankings and whatnot.

I'm (sort of) old and have gone through this type a couple times. But the transaction was handled by Escrow.com in both cases. Escrow.com released the funds in both cases without any hassle.

I'm not sure what the deal is with Flippa's escrow. It seems to be a scenario where buyers can steal all your website code, "taste your domains" and then return the domain after wasting a lot of the seller's time.

How would you handle that type of scenario?

notflippy said:

I see that epik offers escrow and has very good feedback online.

I am curious to know how epik would handle the following scenario that I am dealing with.

Currently on Flippa a buyer refused to release Escrow funds held by FIippa for a domain/website that he fully received from me.
He made completely weird reasons why he wouldn't..

I was planning to just ask him to return everything and cancel the deal.
The I discovered that this cretin had taken the website offline and replaced it with a sale page. Yes, I'm not kidding.
He won't release escrow, but is trying to sell it RIGHT NOW.

Flippa's stance is that i should just get the domain/website back. But I already asked for the buyer to unlock the domain and instead he listed it for sale and sent another bs message to me.

My stance is is that this buyer is a sneaky jerk and that he should be both banned and funds released since he removed the entire website which impacts rankings and whatnot.

I'm (sort of) old and have gone through this type a couple times. But the transaction was handled by Escrow.com in both cases. Escrow.com released the funds in both cases without any hassle.

I'm not sure what the deal is with Flippa's escrow. It seems to be a scenario where buyers can steal all your website code, "taste your domains" and then return the domain after wasting a lot of the seller's time.

How would you handle that type of scenario?

Click to expand...

What you described happens on Flippa ALL THE TIME. There is no recourse. You have what I call "a yard sale", filled with counterparty risk:

Domain Registrar
Host
SSL provider
Escrow agent
Site marketplace (Flippa)

You buy a site and now you don't know who to go for recourse. I would start with Escrow.com -- they released your funds but need to get those funds to you, the seller.

If this was on Epik, the whole thing would be integrated. This is a case study of why we need a better alternative for buying and selling entire websites. We hope to get there in 2020.

Rob Monster said:

What you described happens on Flippa ALL THE TIME. There is no recourse. You have what I call "a yard sale", filled with counterparty risk:

Domain Registrar
Host
SSL provider
Escrow agent
Site marketplace (Flippa)

You buy a site and now you don't know who to go for recourse. I would start with Escrow.com -- they released your funds but need to get those funds to you, the seller.

If this was on Epik, the whole thing would be integrated. This is a case study of why we need a better alternative for buying and selling entire websites. We hope to get there in 2020.

Click to expand...

I look forward to 2020! Best of success with it. Competition is always good.
I just don't understand how Flippa's own inhouse Escrow "powered by" Assembly Payments can operate like this.

My wife feels like this is akin to car thief. As if some guy gave us a fake cashier's check and was trying to sell my car.

Just wild.

This happened to me as well on Flippa 3-4 years ago. Where i sold my android app game on flippa. Buyer paid via paypal. This was my first sale. I went for celebration and did not check back my emails for few days (early celebration). The buyer charged back and though paypal did not receive anything from me during these days, the money returned to buyer. It was shocking for me. I reported paypal with evidence but it was too late. I asked for returned of the app but the buyer went unresponsive. I am not using flippa anymore.

So I am very disturbed now by developments. I asked the buyer who refused to release funds to push the domain back to me. (it's a good domain)
He then turned around and released funds and stated he received an incredible life changing offer for it.
I could practically puke at the thought of this awful person throwing up a sales page without paying me and then somehow getting a big offer in less than 48 hours.
Seriously, what are the odds of that happening so fast?

The world definitely needs a better flippa. We need a better domain marketplace in general.

The commissions are inexcusably high and we accept that because we are used to it. As I've heard, epik escrow has a very good rep so I'm sure it would handle things well in that regard.

The main issue is getting people to use it and getting customers to be aware of it. I think getting sellers to use it would be very easy, simply by reducing commissions. Everybody likes more money.

If a lot of sellers changed their NS for domains to this hypothetical flippa marketplace, I think that would eventually attract end user traffic as well. Additional marketing would be needed tho.

Small domain names sellers should forget Flippa for selling their domain names. It is useless. FULL STOP. They are mainly concentrating on big money websites only.