Today Liz and I chat to Alex Champagne from Empire Flippers, which is another marketplace you can use to buy and sell websites. Alex shares some really interesting insights into the types of websites that are generating awesome returns for their sellers.
These are websites that are selling at great multiples, and they’re selling quickly. These are the types of websites that all our students are currently building and buying, so this is worth paying attention to.
Liz Raad: Hi, and welcome to the Website Showcase and this week, I’d like to introduce you to Alex Champagne from Empire Flippers. Big welcome to you, Alex.
Alex Champagne: Hi Matt and Liz, thanks for having me.
Brief Background On Empire Flippers
Liz: And first of all, can you give us a little bit of background on Empire Flippers? Because you guys have had an amazing growth story over the last few years! So, what is it you focus on and where you’ve come from?
Alex: Absolutely. So, Empire Flippers is the largest online, curated marketplace for online businesses. So, any business that can be operated from anywhere can be bought or sold on our marketplace. That’s basically the jist and what that ultimately looks like. It is a lot of content sites, Amazon FBAs, e-commerce, SaaS etc. So, there’s a lot of different options there.
Matt: And what’s your position there at Empire Flippers?
Alex: So, I’m the director of sales here at Empire Flippers. I joined the team about three years ago. I have a background in conversion-rate optimization, and marketing. I’ve launched a lot of the businesses we sell, so I had a lot of knowledge. I was looking at joining a good team and like you said, our corporation’s really growing. It’s been an Inc-500 company, which is the fastest growing companies in America three years in a row now. So, it’s been a really awesome experience and I’m just excited to be on the team.
Matt: And, like us, you get to work from home I notice.
Alex: I do! You’re looking at the home office right here. We actually just moved in here, so if you’re hearing an echo, we’re still trying to get some furniture in here. But it’ll get better.
Matt: So where in the world are you located, so that all our guys know?
Alex: Yes, so this part is a little bit more boring. It’s usually more fun when I’m travelling around and getting to stay in exotic locations but I’m actually in Houston, Texas. So, we’ll be having our first child in October. So, we moved back home to be close to family. We’re excited about that!
But the team’s all over the place. That’s another unique thing about us. We have guys in South America, Europe, Asia, Australia. So, we’re all over.
Liz: And that’s the awesome thing about what we all do, which is, have online business.
Alex: Absolutely.
Liz: And that’s, obviously, that’s the reason why we’re all in here.
Awesome Recent Website Sale
Liz: So today you’ve actually got a website that’s recently sold that we wanted to talk to you about, because it’s a really cool website. Do you want to give us a few details about that?
Alex: For sure. So, if you’re not familiar with Empire Flippers, all of our listings are housed under our marketplace tab, so you can just navigate there and check them out. We even keep our sold listings up as well so you can see historical data and you can really see how we’ve grown. We have sites back there that are two or three thousand dollars that are sold on the marketplace.
So this particular listing is one that’s on there. The listing number, if you want to look at it, is 46267.
Simple Amazon Affiliate Website For Sale
Alex: So, this is an Amazon Associate site, and I know that you guys talk about this and teach the benefits of these type of businesses. And they are really great websites. They are very popular with buyers. We have a lot of great sellers.
Liz: Yes, I’ll just quickly let everyone know what that means. It means that you don’t buy stock (inventory), you don’t have any stock yourself. What this website does is it talks about products and then sends people through to Amazon. And you get paid if someone buys something off Amazon. You don’t actually own the product or anything like that, you just get an affiliate commission. So again, coming around to our preferred strategies of websites that are as easy as possible to run and as autopilot as possible.
Alex: Absolutely, and what I love about this and what I always explain this to our newer buyers is, whenever I’m looking for a newer product I usually type, “Best Coffee Maker” into Google. And 99% of the time it’s an Amazon Associate site that’s going to be guiding you through that purchase process.
Matt: And so, you found at Empire Flippers that these sort of sites, when you get these listings, they sell really well?
Good Amazon Affiliate Sites Can Sell Very Quickly!
Alex: They do. Obviously, size, niche etc., there’s a lot of variables that go into how quickly it sells. But on the whole Amazon Associate sites sell extremely well. So, this one, for example, was priced at $76,000. And we sold it in a few hours, and we had multiple wires come in for a list price. It was a wire race!
Matt: So it listed and sold within several hours!
Liz: And so, what was the multiple that it sold for? How much was it making per month?
Alex: It was making $2,300 a month in average monthly net profit, and we had it listed at 33x. It’s a monthly multiple, so right under three years.
How Website Valuations Have Changed
Liz: It’s interesting we’ve been talking about this, about how the market’s changed; and you guys would have seen this as well over the last eight to ten years. The website valuations have changed a lot. It’s a lot more stable, there’s a lot of websites with good history, good consistent profits and good consistent traffic too. So, we’ve seen those website valuations rise.
Matt: And is that why that one sold so quickly? Was it just a no-brainer? Was it a very secure site? What do you think made it sell so quickly and have multiple offers on it?
Why This Website Sold So Well…
Alex: So, I think there’s a couple factors that go into that. One of those is the niche. It’s in the outdoor space, which is something that a lot of people can get excited about. It’s always great to be able to buy something that you have passion around. And it’s also something that people consistently come back and purchase. So, it’s usually similar to pets, people are going to buy outdoor stuff. It’s usually wealthier clientele. It’s just a target market that people really like. So, you see a lot of buyers that like this space.
Liz: Yeah, well congratulations. Awesome result for the brokerage and for the seller. And for the buyer. Everyone’s happy!
So, it just reinforces to us this is a really great marketplace to be involved in and a place if you want to make investments going forward into the future. Websites is now becoming one of those asset classes. We invest in property, we invest in shares, we invest in business, and websites (or digital assets) we consider one of those ones that are really growing and a great way to get a return on your investment.
Alex: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. The returns on websites are phenomenal. And we’re trying to do our best to set the standard on keeping and making sure that we have a standard practice that everyone can clearly partake in. So, we try to make our marketplace as friendly as possible for the guy who really understands online business, to the guy who is just getting his feet wet and wants to buy his first asset. So, completely agree.
Liz: Fantastic. So, a big thanks to Alex from Empire Flippers for sharing with us all this weeks Website Showcase.
If you want to find out more about buying and selling websites on Empire Flippers you can check them out here: https://empireflippers.com
