Flippa Security Possibly Compromised, change your password

Posted on July 20, 2010 by ibuysites

Reports are circulating of a security breach at Flippa and screenshots have been posted online of what their admin interface looks like.

The known hacker (and possibly some unknown ones) may have had access to all Flippa accounts, private messages, bids, watchlists and other user controlled functions.

Flippa has neither accepted nor denied the allegations.

It would be a prudent move to change your Flippa account password. If you’ve ever given Flippa access to take a pdf of your Google Analytics stats, it may be worth changing the password of your GA account as well. If you’ve used Flippa’s integration with the escrow.com service … you get the picture.

As Flippa and Sitepoint have common logins, this may apply to you even if you don’t use Flippa, but have an account at the Sitepoint forums.

Flippa Announces Major Change – Addition Of Escrow Service

Posted on January 28, 2010 by ibuysites

I don’t believe anyone has blogged about this yet.

Details are patchy at the moment, but Flippa’s General Manager Dave Slutzkin has announced that Flippa is adding an escrow service to their site. It’s in partnership with escrow.com (well known, but seriously flawed) and is likely to be an optional service buyers and sellers can use at Flippa.

In the past there’ve been instances where Flippa wasn’t paid the “success fee” for a site selling in their marketplace. The advantage with having an in-house escrow is that Flippa will now know when a site sold in the marketplace has changed hands (whether on not the WHOIS is modified). Honest buyers and sellers who aren’t looking to cheat Flippa out of their success fee should have no issues with Flippa knowing the sale completion date.

It’s not yet known whether the pricing will be fair i.e. users being charged for only the service provided: escrow on the domain. It may well follow escrow.com’s current pricing: price based on the entire value of the site even though it’s only the domain that’s getting escrow protection.

All You Wanted To Know About Website Buying & Selling

Posted on January 12, 2010 by ibuysites

Here’s a headsup: People wanting to discuss matters relating to the buying and selling of websites now have a new forum where they can chat with like minded individuals.

The quality of the chat is extremely high and though the forum is only a week old today, it boasts some of the most respected members from places like Sitepoint and elsewhere who advise on the subject. Already signed up are brokers, accountants and lawyers who deal with matters like Accountancy Due Diligence and Contracts of Sale, buyers and sellers. Flippa is there asking questions and getting feedback on how they can improve their service.

It’s a place where you can find out about the best places to buy a site, what scams to watch out for, what’s a fair price, how to perform due diligence, the best places to list a site for sale, how the pros make money from site holding and site flipping …and much more. Head on over and pose them your most difficult question.

If you interested in any aspect of website buying or selling – you need to be there. Go to the Experienced People forum right now. If yours is not an internet business, the related site for selling a business is this one.

Shill Bidding. Rigged Bidding. Coming to an auction near you

Posted on November 7, 2009 by ibuysites

Have you ever bid for a website or domain and had the uneasy feeling that the seller himself was bidding against you to artificially push your bidding up? You’d be surprised at how often that happens. Rigged bidding (also called shill bidding) is common in any bidding marketplace and there’s just no way you or the auction platform owners can do much about it.

Shill bidders are a clever lot. They setup new accounts on different IPs. They buy accounts. They ask friends to bid (and they reciprocate the favour when the friend has a domain or site he’s selling).

The net effect of the shill bidder’s activity is that you end up paying a higher price than if the auction was a fair competition among competing bidders. Places like Digital Point, Sitepoint and Flippa seem to make no attempt at shill control. True, they’ll ban you if you try to open another account from the same IP you currently use to sign into their services. But that’s pretty much their own defence. And, let’s face it, pretty useless. We’re talking a webmaster crowd here – people who know their way around using a proxy, people who know how to monitor their IP and are aware when the ISP changes it. If there’s extra profit to be made you can be sure people will try to make it even if the method is dishonest. Bear that in mind the next time you’re bidding – there’s a good chance there’s a shill bidder competing against you.

The latest news is that one of the biggest domain name resellers, Snapnames, has been caught with their pants down. For the last four years or so they’ve had an employee who’s been pushing prices up, causing people like you and me to overpay for our domains … and making Snapnames a huge chunk of extra profit in the bargain.

Unfortunately, many auction sites are designed so that the owner stands to gain if the auction item sells for a higher price. I point no finger at Flippa, I believe they are perfectly honest in their business and above what happened at SnapNames. But, a percentage link between sale price and earnings at the holding company – whether it’s eBay or SEDO – is always going to cause some level of suspicion.

It’s a rough world out there. Take care.

How has Flippa settled in?

Posted on October 22, 2009 by ibuysites

As many of you know, Sitepoint has split its marketplace. While link exchanges, service advertisements etc., are still with Sitepoint, website sales have moved to a new company and a new domain: http://www.flippa.com.

Flippa, controversially, charges a “success fee”. While you still pay for listing a site – albeit, a slightly lower price than before – there’s a hefty 5% success fee (capped at $500). A summary of what has changed is on this Sitepoint thread.

Flippa does offer more filtering options and allows site buyers to specify just high PR sites, low Alexa ranked ones or those selling for more than $10K, for example. There are a few other improvements though it’s hotly debated whether the Web 2.0 look is an improvement on not. The overall Flippa concept and implementation come in for scathing attack in the comments on Flippa’s own blog triggering a frantic response from Flippa that they really are taking feedback.

The name, Flippa, and the overall design and focus of the new enterprise seems to cater for the lower priced-lower quality sites at the expense of the better ones. For example, anyone interested in buying a listed site at the BIN price is expected to complete the transaction immediately via Paypal. All well and good but Paypal has a limit of $10K. It’s apparent that Flippa doesn’t expect to list a lot of websites at above that price point. Interestingly, that’s the price point at which their success fee maxes out (5% of $10K = $500 which is the success fee cap).

What do you think of Flippa?

Added: Snapshot of Flippa page when you click the BIN button
flippa2

SitePoint.com MarketPlace Bullshxt Detector – WOWcheaters.com

Posted on November 6, 2007 by midascode

There is one thing that really annoys me in the world of buying and selling websites…. the sheer amount of bullshxt that people use to try and sell their sites.

Today I am going to look at a prime example with the website WOWcheaters.com

Here is a snippet from the listing:

“This forum is already well on its way to being one of the largest WoW forums around!”

This is quite a statement to make. So I went to google and searched for “World of Warcraft forum”, strangely, the forums had vastly more activity and members than WOWcheaters.com, in fact, there was so much difference that it really was chalk and cheese. They had millions of posts, hundreds of people online at anytime, whereas WOWcheaters has just 200 active members.

In fact, I took a screenshot of the original site listing and deleted any lies, exaggerations, or irrelevant info. Here are the results: WOWcheaters Image

According to that image, over 50% of what he said was not relevant or of any use.

People like this give the industry a bad name, I am amazed Sitepoint allow it.

Note: Here is the original listing: Sitepoint Listing

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