If you are interested in selling your web property (online business), there are quite a few considerations. The top ones are: Is my business ready for a sale? How do I find a buyer? What about scammers or competitors stealing my ideas? Should I use a broker, and who? How do I price it? What documents do I need? What is proof of income? How do I prove my traffic sources?

We get questions about what the actual process is to purchase a website (and many sellers are confused since this dates back to the origins of mergers and acquisitions). It’s a business like any other; the typical process applies for purchasing. For this example, we are going to use a broker scenario where they are the middle-man to the transaction. Summary of the process: Broker emails out the listing(s), or you find a business through networking and outreach.

What are the tools that we can use to check domain name information and its history? This is important so we can see where the domain has been, how many times it’s moved around (hosting companies) and how long it’s actually been in service. We can also research who owns it, and how many other sites they own that might be a conflict of interest. The first tool we are going to use is “whois”.

There is a great blog from a VC at Redpoint by Tomasz Tunguz. In it he discusses every kind of SaaS business you can think of. He has a great article that analyses pricing over the last six years (read more). The large trend in SaaS is about a 3-4 times multiple of net. Online businesses are typically calculated from their net profit (income minus expenses), so a business that generates $100,000 a year in free cash flow/profit would sell between $300k to $400k.

GA or Google Analytics is a great resource for any business owner. The amount of useful reporting and analysis that can come out of the platform is staggering. Many businesses are not using even a small percentage of the power of GA, so let’s discuss a couple things you can do right now to get better data out of it. A. To start with, do you have GA enabled on every web page?

To start with, if your a seller, then the business is going to be worth a great deal more to you than it is to a buyer. This is one of the due diligence points that we look through when purchasing a business (real site age). Finding out the true age of a site can be tricky. Domain names that are only a year old doesn’t necessarily mean the business is only a year old.

-We are not licensed attorneys, so please do not take this as Legal advice. Always consult council before signing anything you are not familiar with and do not completely understand. An NDA is abbreviated as a Non Disclosure Agreement. They are typically sent by the seller (or seller’s broker) to a prospective buyer. The idea is to give each party some comfort (these are always weighed more to the sellers interests, however).