Enter the Mind of the Website Buyer to Sell Your Website
I recently advised some website sellers in Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. I thought I’d share some insights with you that I shared with them.
For a website to sell, a Buyer must give the Seller some money. For the money to change hands, the Seller must answer some unspoken subconscious questions in the Mind of the Buyer. And these questions pop up in the Buyer’s mind before the Seller ever gets a chance to speak to the Buyer.
As a Seller, you believe, and rightly so, that you have a great website for sale. But remember that Buyers don’t know you or your business so they are always skeptical.
Let’s look at 2 very common scenarios:
1. The Buyer is browsing a website-for-sale site looking for a website to buy. He sees the Seller’s Website Listing Title and Price.
Buyer’s Mind: ‘Why is this website priced at a multiple so much higher than the other websites in its category? I can’t get a decent return on my money at that price.’
Result: Most buyers have hundreds of other website listings to look at and just move on to the next one. For the few Buyers that do click on the listing, the business must have some truly unique advantage that either reduces costs or increases sales to justify the high price. If the Buyer is unsure of what to make of the stated benefit, she just moves on.
2. The Seller writes in the Listing Description that if the new owner simply does A, B, and C, he will generate tremendous additional sales from the website.
Buyer’s Mind: ‘Well if it’s so easy, how come the current owner hasn’t done it yet? Doesn’t make sense that there’s easy money to make and he didn’t try to make it.’
Result: A lot of Buyers will move on to listings that are easier to assess. However, some Buyers will contact the Seller with skepticism to find out what the “catch” is.
The Seller then usually states that he has too many projects and not enough time to implement the money-making ideas. This could be absolutely true and the ideas could be huge money-makers. But the Buyer doesn’t want to pay the extra money to find out that the ideas that no-one has ever tested on the website, don’t work. Buyers want to pay for actual income so it’s very dificult to sell a website based on potential alone.
These are just a few of the instinctive reactions that Buyers have when they assess websites for sale. These are the mental obstacles that Sellers have to overcome to sell websites. Of course, as professional website brokers, from experience, we have developed simple solutions to walk around these hurdles. And we learn everyday from the marketplace.
Let us sell your website for you.
Author: Kris Tabetando
Kris Tabetando provides mergers & acquisitions (M&A) advisory and brokerage services to Internet companies. He also partners with investors to acquire & manage Internet businesses.
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