Flippa facilitates buying and selling websites on the Internet. By using this service, buyers and sellers around the world can transaction fully-fledged websites or only the corresponding domain name, by using an auction-based model where the parties involved can bid up the site’s price during a time period established initially by the seller.
The site accepts PayPal and credit-cards as payment methods, and for some countries an escrow option is also available. To help the buyers do due diligence, Flippa automatically retrieves site data such as whois records, length of time since the domain was registered and search engine rankings data. In addition, the sellers are required to confirm their identity via an unique phone number, and reputation grades from their previous transactions help identify the bad ones quickly.
The site is maintained by a company located in Victoria, Australia. Their traffic seems to have stabilized around 100’000 monthly unique visitors.
The website was founded by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz; it had revenues of $1.816 million in the 2011 financial year, 10 employees, and in 2012 it received one of the StartupSmart Awards.