Flippa, an online marketplace for selling digital assets, recently announced that they have raised the success fee on the marketplace from 10% to 15%. This will likely make many sellers on Flippa upset.
The “success fee” is the commission Flippa gets when any transaction takes place on the marketplace or something is sold. Flippa allows individuals and companies to list three types of digital assets; websites, domain names, and apps. The new 15% commission applies to everything.
If you feel the 15% commission is too much there is a way around it. If you use the Flippa Escrow system, which is free, the commission fee is reduced slightly by 3%. That means you only need to pay 12% commission when you sell on Flippa. That is if the buyer wants to use Flippa Escrow. Sellers are allowed to give buyers the option of PayPal (which Flippa and I don't recommend), Escrow, and Flippa Escrow.
Another important change for Flippa sellers is that starter sites and established sites listing fees have been raised. To keep the quality of the listings Flippa charges a listing fee, they called it an insertion fee, to list on the Flippa marketplace. This is separate from the 15% commission they charge when you sell a website, domain name, or app.
You used to be able to list starter sites, basically new websites with little traffic or revenue, for $9. Starter site listing fees are now $19. Established websites listing fees with traffic and revenue has also been raised from $19 to $29. It's unclear to me how Flippa defines starter sites vs established sites though.
In addition if you want to list your website in the website classifieds section, Flippa now charges $9. To my understanding this used to be free. This means you put your website up for sale on Flippa but are not putting it in an active auction with a time limit.
Flippa has not said anything about charging an insertion fee for domains listed in a domain portfolio. These are domains sellers list on the platform but again are not in an auction format. If Flippa did charge to list in the Domain Portfolio, I'm sure most sellers would just use other platforms.
To my knowledge no email notification has gone out about the increased 15% commission fee . Also it's not clear whether current auctions on Flippa are exempt from the increase and are grandfathered in at the old 10% commission rate. If you have a current auction on Flippa I would definitely ask customer support.
Flippa has added and tweaked many new features to the platform. They just recently added a Request Reserve button to make it easier for buyers and sellers to share the reserve price. I doubt this accounts for the increase. Flippa more likely realized they could raise the commission fee, so they did.
How do you feel about Flippa increasing the commission fee to 15%? Does this make you upset or was this to be expected?
Flippa has been pissing off its customers from a long time. The UX is horrible. Search functionality, content of their emails and flow of selling domains sucks. Marketplace full of crappy domains/Websites.
And now they have increased their listing prices and success fees to piss off their customers , I have no idea where this shitty marketplace is going, with poor customer support and no live chat option available, they have increased their prices. Somebody need to build a new marketplace for buying and selling websites/domains, Flippa needs a rival who can compete with them.
I was searching for Flippa alternatives on web and found a website who claims to building the smartest marketplace for trading websites/Domains on web. Their homepage (**) shows few days to launch and they have double the twitter followers as of Flippa before launch. I was extremely fascinated and subscribed to get the promo code when they’ll launch.