This month, Flippa made an addition that gives you direct access to professional due diligence on any of their website listings, directly from the listing’s due diligence page. Even for those who have been doing their own due diligence for a while, it’s easy to overlook how significant this is.
If you’ve ever been ready to make a purchase, but held back at the last minute because of doubts you had about a seller or the site, you’re not alone.
In fact, one of the most common fears of both experienced and amateur buyers is the fear of loss; either through buying a business that eventually loses its traffic or revenue, or through being deceived by a dishonest seller with inaccurate and faked revenue or traffic proofs for example.
Solid due diligence will give you many of the guarantees that you need to have confidence in a site that you’re about to buy. Just like running DD on an offline business, or even a house purchase, it involves taking a thorough look at all the information you have.The difference with online businesses is that it often involves making a judgement on that information and joining the dots, to see what’s likely to happen several months in the future. This is the kind of knowledge you can only get from experience, but unfortunately with buying and selling websites being such a specialised field, it’s the kind of experience very few people have.
This is why we built Centurica, the first complete Website Due Diligence Solution.
We’re a team with extensive experience in buying and selling internet businesses. Our goal is to provide buyers with ALL the information and interpretation they need to make informed decisions about the businesses and sellers they choose to work with.
A few examples
You can see what we do in our sample report, but here are a few ways that we’ve saved buyers money through smarter due diligence:
- Uncovering a scam where a site’s main revenue source was an affiliate product owned by another company belonging to the same seller. Commission rates had been set artificially high to inflate revenues and make the company seem like it was far more profitable than it actually was.
- Spotting an obscure, but valid trademark violation in the domain of a dropship ecommerce retailer.
- Discovering a partially hidden and very low quality backlink profile, and several warning signals of a pending search penalty for a site where 67% of its traffic came from Google. The client didn’t buy the site, and it was relisted two weeks later having lost just over half its traffic in the most recent Penguin Update this May.
Outsourcing your Due Diligence to professionals isn’t just about avoiding loss. We currently work with several investors and brokers who use our services simply to save time and resources, leaving them to do what they do best – source new deals.
You can find the link to any listing’s specific report by clicking the “View Extended Due Diligence Data for this listing” button, and choosing the “Get Your Report” option from the blue box on the right hand side:
Photo credit: mrgariss0n
