How Long Does It Take To Sell a Website?
We receive this question from clients everyday. Selling a business, including a website business, is very different from selling a product at a retail store. The buyer doesn’t purchase a business to consume it like she consumes a product. The buyer purchases a business to work in it.
As such, when an investor acquires a business, she also acquires a job and other responsibilities. This is a big commitment. In addition to a mental and physical commitment, the new owner has to make a financial commitment. In some cases a buyer must have specialized knowledge of the industry.
All of this means that a business takes time to sell. This applies to traditional businesses as well as Internet businesses.
Don’t forget that there is detailed due diligence and back-and-forth negotiations of everything in a business sale including purchase price, sale terms, and escrow terms. There is also the actual process of transferring money and assets between the buyer and seller. All of these activities add a few days, and sometimes weeks, to the sale process.
How much time? There’s no definite answer to that question. It depends on the type of website, the buyer market at that time, the price of the website, and so much more.
We’ve had websites under $50,000 sell within 2 weeks. And we’ve had highly-specialized, high-priced websites take up to 9 months to sell because very few buyers have the specialized knowledge or money to be able to acquire them.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that a website doesn’t sell at all. The buyer market may have dried up for the specific type of website. Or the website may have too many negative points that scare off buyers. Not all traditional businesses sell. Similarly, not all websites sell. That’s just the reality of buying and selling websites.
This doesn’t give a definite answer to the question we started out with because there is no definite answer. Nobody can predict how long it takes to sell any website.
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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