How to sell an e-store?

[julie_thompson]

Not my MIVA Merchant store!

But I have a question for my client who asked me to sell his online store. And I have no idea the best way to go about it.

How does one arrive at asking price? Also, which venue should I look into in selling his store?

Details:

He has a turn-key scooter and moped e-store. His store generated over $200,000.00 in gross sales in 2005. His store is ranked organically on Yahoo, MSN and Google in the top ten for quite a few highly competitive keyword phrases, such as gas mopeds, retro scooter, gopeds, mopeds, pit bikes.

His store is completely turn-key, fully designed, stat program, etc.. And his scooter vendor is a drop shipper, meaning no inventory is required.

I cannot express how much I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to sell his site for him.

Thanks so much!


(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pit%20bikes)

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Do a search on Google (http://www.google.com) for Domain Apprasial.

GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com) also offers this service rather inexpensively.

There are sites to auction and sell your website too, like GoDaddy.com and sitebazaar.net (http://www.sitebazaar.net/)

[Julie Wilber]

Hi Julie,

I found this link and it might be helpful:Business Owner's Toolkit (Selling your business) (http://http://www.toolkit.cch.com/text/P11_2000.asp). If anything it's a very interesting read.

Thanks!

[julie_thompson]

Thank you so much Vic & Julie! You both rock! And your links will certainly get me started in a great direction.

Any other ideas, personal experiences with selling or suggestions is still truly appreciated!

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

The more you "market" the product (business) the more likely you are to get a decent price. My experiance (although mostly indirect) is that online business owners usually over estimate the worth of their store. The biggest tangable asset that an online store will posses is usually thier customer base...depending on the type of retail business this could be worth $10 to $30 per customer (or $300 if you're selling high ticket items like diamonds<G>)

Other than that, the domain name itself might be of some value if its really good, but the fact that store is turn key won't appeal to many because there are not that many folks looking to "just get into online business" Most are trying move THEIR business online.

But again, putting together a little "information" package illuminating everything the site has to offer will help greatly.

Oh, one more thing, make sure all agreements are transferrable (and add that to the information packet. A lot of buyers may not even think about that until its brought up. (Know that one from experiance...a BIG dot com I worked for bought another dom com...but no one looked into the transferability of the distribution agreements...

[julie_thompson]

Hi Bruce! Thank you so much for your time to share your insightful experience with selling an e-store! Your info is extremely helpful and I am using as my guide to formulate my client's package.

With gratitude,

Julie