The online business flipping scene is exploding right now. New brokers and marketplaces are popping up all over the place, and dealflow opportunities are at an all-time high, with loads of new buyers and sellers hitting the market.
I’ve experienced this first-hand. In the beginning, I knew only about flippa.com, and I spent many years flipping 4 and 5-figure websites. With time, the industry started segmenting, and brokers such as Empire Flippers and Quiet Light began to appear, focusing on a lower volume of deals and higher quality online businesses, at a higher multiple. Fast forward to the pandemic, and the number of marketplaces and brokers exploded. There’s everything from newsletter brokers to EU-focused youtube channels brokers. And we’re all for it.
This post serves as a catch-all list for online brokers. If you want more deal flow, or want to maximize the chances of selling your online business this article will help you. We aim to maintain this list and add any new brokers that we find. So if you are familiar with any marketplace or broker not mentioned in the table below, please comment or contact us.
We won’t be able to review every single one of them in detail, but we’ve summarized every one that we found in the table below:
Want to receive the filterable google sheet? Sign up to our newsletter below and we will send you a copy:
Table of Contents
Facts and Figures
As part of our research, we looked into self-reported data on listing time, ie- the average time it took to sell a website, as well as audience size and number of listings. Here’s what we found:
- Among brokers who reported this data, the average time it took to sell an online business was 55.8 days.
- The average audience per listing is 703 users per listing. This means that on average, a broker will be able to direct 703 to your listing.
- On average, each broker has 667.5 deals available
What are our favorite online business brokers and marketplaces?
1- The Big Ones
Flippa: Our #1 choice for buying small and medium websites
We’ll start with the blue chips. Flippa has been around since 2009 and it’s, to our knowledge, the biggest marketplace for online businesses. At the moment of writing, there are 4 791 businesses listed, with prices ranging from 1$ to 59 000 000$.
Flippa can be a source of great deals if you know where to look, but it’s also home to a few questionable businesses. Be sure to do your due diligence thoroughly, and in case of doubt, hire somebody to vet the deal.
The fees are pretty standard with a tiered % fee based on size. They have recently introduced a subscription model for buyers, for which the primary benefit is the early access to deal flow.
Flippa reports pretty standard multiples, with the average multiple for the first half of 2023 coming at 36.36x, which after their 10% commissions equates to a 32.7x average multiple.
Most of the businesses I have bought and featured on the Stream SEO newsletter have come from Flippa.
Overall, this is our #1 recommendation for buying sites, as it offers the largest deal flow among the sites on our list.
Empire Flippers: The best broker to sell your business
Empire Flippers has one of the best reputations in the industry. They’re known for their strict requirements and rigorous vetting process. Because of this, they command higher fees and usually can sell your business at higher multiples.
They’ve been around for a while and are known to publish great content on the website flipping industry.
Due to the size of their audience and their strict requirements, which lead to a small number of listings, I consider this to be the best broker for selling an online business. They claim that the average site on their platform is sold in under a month, which matches my experience with the platform.
If you pass their requirements, this is one of our favorite brokers to use. They do a great job at marketing their businesses and usually command higher multiples than competitors. In 2023, their average sales multiple was 48.2x, equating to about a 41x multiple after the 15% sales commission (note: this applies only to sales under 700 $ 000$).
Quiet Light: Second Best for Selling
Much like EF, Quiet Light enjoys a good reputation. They’ve been brokering online businesses for almost 20 years
They sell a wide range of businesses, from mid-five-figure businesses to seven- and eight-figure businesses.
Unfortunately, I can’t give my personal opinion as I’ve never closed a deal with them, but judging by the quality of their deal flow, the content they put out, their reputation, and the multiples listed, I would say this would be one of my first choices to list a 7—or 8-figure business.
FE International: Highest audience per listing
In fourth of our list of “blue chip” brokers and marketplaces, we’ve got FE. We have no idea what FE stands for, and we don’t really care. What we do care about is the excellent deals they have on offer.
Their curatorship of deals is so good that they have garnered an estimated monthly audience of over 60,000 users while only offering 10 deals in their marketplace at the time of writing. This represents the highest audience per listing in our data set, which we consider the top signal for consideration for sellers.
As of late, they have focused on larger deals, being responsible for the sale of Send Owl and Answer the public, among many others, so if your site is earning less than 10 or 20 000$/month, you probably won’t be accepted. We highly recommend it if you have the scale or budget to buy and sell with FE.
Acquire.com: The place to go for SaaS businesses
This Saasy broker/marketplace came into the scene with a bang. They flipped the script on the traditional listing fee model by charging a subscription to buyers.
Nowadays, this has become the norm with flippa and some other of the big players implementing a subscription-based model for buyers.
They also introduced new metrics and valuation methods, preferring TTM, basically the last 12 months’ earnings, rather than a monthly earnings multiple and adding variables such as “Recurring Anual Revenue” rather than just average monthly earnings. This can be confusing, especially for content sites, where subscription-based models aren’t the norm.
They gained their initial traction through twitter and most of the buyers and sellers are indie hackers building SaaS products.
This is a great place to find software businesses started by technical founders lacking marketing chops or marketers lacking technical skills to scale. Much like Flippa, there are loads of opportunities as well as a lot of red flags. The latest seem to be AI startups that go viral and quickly lose traction as competitors emerge.
Investors Club: A Great Source of Content Sites
IC offers a range of mostly content but also e-commerce and some SaaS businesses at decent multiples.
Having bought a site from investors club, I can confidently say that there are some good deals to be had, particularly for content.
Their current average multiple is 31x, which after their 7% fee comes at around a 29x multiple. In my experience this is just around average for content sites, making a good source of dealflow for buyers.
Their valuations are fair, as are their fees, and the team behind the marketplace is solid with a vast experience in the industry.
Motion Invest
Founded by Spencer Haws from niche pursuits fame, Motion Invest sells content sites mostly in the lower range of the market. We don’t have any first hand experience dealing with them but from browsing their listings for the past couple of years, I can say that there are a few fairly priced hidden gems to be found. There are also quite a few not-so-interesting sites.
My biggest complaint is the interface. I find it quite clunky, and the user experience could be better, but overall, this is a solid marketplace for content sites.
If you are selling, you should also know that they have a 1 month exclusivity requirement. In my opinion, this is a fair clause that allows you to search for other brokers if you are successful after a month.
They claim to have an average selling time of 12 days, which would make it the fastest marketplace to sell your website. This makes sense as their listings tend to be on the lower side of the market, making it quite liquid.
They also claim an average sale multiple of 36x, which depending on the size of the size would result in a multiple of 34x for sites above 500 000$ and 29x for sites below 20 000$.
They provide this interesting graphic which shows that they are able to sell even large sites in less than 30 days:
Side Projectors
The decision to include a side projector as one of the “big boys” of online brokerage stems from the fact that they offer a good amount of deal flow.
They have a very interesting “showcase” feature that allows business owners to list their business even if they are not 100% ready to sell. This means you get access to a very large database, close to 10,000 startups, that could be for sale. It also offers co-founder opportunities.
2- Niche focused brokers and marketplaces
Duuce: Buy and Sell Newsletters
Newsletter businesses have seen a great boom in recent years. Newsletters allow you to have a direct connection with your audience that is not dependent on any algorithm updates or the whims of the big social media companies.
For that reason, we’ve decided to include Duuce in our list of best online business brokers.
They offer some great opportunities, though due diligence can be harder. Its hard to tell how engaged the audience actually is, how much conversions you can expect and how many real subscribers the newsletter actually has.
Multiples seem to vary wildly, going as low as 7x and as high as 80x, so there are definitely some opportunities for buyers. We couldn’t determine the fees Duuce charged.
Trustiu: EU Based Businesses
If you are based in Europe, trustiu is a very interesting marketplace. It focuses on sites, youtube channels, and e-commerce businesses based in Europe. These usually command a lower multiple and are often times in Spanish, French, and German. If you speak one of these languages, there are loads of great deals to be had here.
They offer competitive pricing, with a success fee that varies from 8% to 10%, and even though I have personally never bought a site from them, I have enquired about many and I can say that the team is very professional and responsive.
Buyers must verify their identity through a quick 2-minute process, which adds an extra sense of safety for sellers.
FlipWP: For WP Plugins and Theme Businesses
FlipWP is a gem of a marketplace. As you might have guessed from its name, it sells exclusively WordPress based businesses. This is mostly themes and plugins.
Wordpress businesses are usually sold at a relatively lower multiple, despite being solid businesses. You’ll often find plugins that have been in the market for more than 10 years with consistent revenue and organic traffic selling for a 20x multiple.
The fees are generally quite low and fixed, favoring larger deals.
3- Best SaaS Tools to Source Deals
Folio Findr: Source Offmarket Deals
Folio Findr was born from a script I’ve used for years and years to close off-market deals successfully. Here’s how it works:
You search for a keyword, the script returns a list of domains ranking for that term, along with the “last update” date- this is the date that the website was last changed. With this list, you can try to find the owner of the abandoned websites, reach out, and acquire the sites.
I turned this script into a SaaS, for my own use, and for anybody who wants to use it.
I obviously recommend it and if you want to get some free credits to test it out, feel free to email pedro at streamseo.com
Disclosure: foliofindr is partly owned by Pedro, the owner of streamseo
Final Thoughts
And that’s it- Our list of brokers and marketplaces to buy and sell online businesses. There’s never been a better time to be in this industry, and the amount of good deals available is simply mind-blowing. We hope that we’ve helped source a good deal with this article and if we have, please reach out and let us know. We would love to feature your story on Stream SEO.
