Advise on sale of website

[chris_hosk]

Hi,

I have a client who i made a website for some years ago, to cut a long story short he has pretty much walked away from sub printing now he rented a small office from me and as he was a month and a half behind on his rent he gave me some blanks to sell which come to the value of around 30% of the rent.
Like alot of things in life i just took it on the chin and moved on but then this morning he has emailed me asking if i can help sell his website.. now apart from the actual cost of the site plus the logo (he had this designed) i have no idea how or what to value it at and to make it harder he said "he doesnt know how much to sell it for" but its in my interest to sell as he will give me 40% towards the money he owed from the rent..
its this site www.thegigglinghippo.com in terms of turnover from the site i would have to request this but judging from the last time i had to update it for him id say 5-600£

any how does anyone in this game have any advise or is it best to advise to just close the site & ill forget the money owed..


Thanks in advance.

Chris

[socialgiraffe]

You will need all the facts and figures to get a reasonable valuation.

With regards to websites not only is turn over important but also traffic figures.

Without that it could be worth £5.00 or £50000

[logobear]

is it worth anything?

[daviddeer]

There's some useful advice here

[derek]

I have just checked the worth of the site and it is $272

where as the DSF site is worth a nice $13,200

[NikGrey]

Derek, Your valuation is based on inward links I bet.

Selling a website is difficult - IF someone likes the domain they may be willing to shell out for it.

Looking at it right now, this has taken some time to build and is a business that's ready to go (as long as the buyer has the ability and stock to fulfill orders) for that reason alone it's got to be worth £1k.

As has been said, do you have access to the google anylitics ? as if it has a high visitor rate you have the added bonus of being able to offer advertising on it too.

[pisquee]

For our new website we had quotes ranging from around £500 to £10,0000
(in the end we went with one which was £3000 plus 10% sales commission, and we got £1500 European funding towards it)

So, there is so much of a range of prices for e-commerce sites, and price isn't everything - we actually got a lot more functionality and features in the site we went for then the more expensive one.

[derek]

I am just letting everyone know the value of the website if it was to be offered for sale, yes you can get a huge variation on prices.

A good friend of mine buys and sells websites for a living and knows exactly how to appraise them.

Also I would like to point out, that if this was worth anywhere near what you say, why is it being sold on Ebay for £119 ? and also another version of it on Ebay staring @ 99p ?

However if you wish to pay the owner £1k go ahead and good luck with it

[ArtyGamer]

I've been developing ecommerce stores for the past seventeen years and have helped clients to sell their businesses, either because they can no longer cope with the demand or because they've simply not invested enough time and have failed. Looking at the eBay listing where it states that a total of £560 has come into the site during its lifetime, along with the £600 that was spent on the website and artwork, the fact that it uses OpenCart and therefore has no proprietary (or even financially valued) coding behind it would actually suggest that the website itself is worthless.

The traffic rankings from various aggregate sites show no statistical information whatsoever, which generally means that they may be aware of the site but it doesn't flag up on their stat radar as the results are negligible. With no stock or equipment to offer, the only actual assets are the logo (a $3 stock image - http://graphicleftovers.com/graphic/hippo-laughing/), the theme (a $43 template http://themeforest.net/item/lagonshop-p ... e-/4322087), and the domain name (too much potential for mis-spellings). Their own data entry is useless unless the buyer decided to produce the exact same products, which is unlikely, so even that is worthless. If someone were attempting to coerce one of my clients into taking over the site for them at a fee, I'd try and convince them otherwise.

My advice would be to remind them that they owe you money for rent, and hope that they have high enough principles not to leave you high and dry. The time it would take to put together a worthwhile prospectus to distort the truth enough to convince someone to buy it means that you'd be putting more money in than you'd get out. I hope you get the money you're due, as there's nothing worse than being stiffed when you've done everything that was required of you.