Buying and Selling Websites and E-commerce Businesses

This week, the Ecwid E-commerce Show hosts Jesse and Richie are joined by Mark Daoust, founder of Quiet Light. Quiet Light is a brokerage for buying and selling websites and e-commerce businesses. Mark gives listeners some inside advice on how to make your domain a valuable web property, and how to eventually sell a successfully developed domain or business.

The discussion touches upon:

• The value of buying an existing domain rather than starting a business from scratch
• Structuring a company for eventual sale
• Making your domain a valuable web property
• The value of landing pages to capture niche markets and drive them back to your site
• The benefit of finding successful domains related to your business, which you should consider buying
• Activities to help with building a successful ongoing business, while creating a sellable asset
• The brand as a big piece of the value of your business
• Moving beyond just reselling someone else’s brand.
• Four pillars of value: risk, growth, transferability, documentation.

Want more insights from Mark? Lucky you! He also has a podcast and a special business course.

Highlights:

• “We don’t think about the business as something having a value in and of itself, the asset value of the business. I would just start with the understanding that if you’re getting started in the world of online business, you’re building something that will hopefully make you some money, but think about it in a different way as well. You’re also building something which is valuable in and of itself.”
• “I want to really teach you what is going to drive the value of your business and what might actually hold that value back from being what it could be. This is really good to know when you start a company, or you’re in the process of starting the company because you can start to build your business around these principles. The beautiful thing about these principles as well is if you get these right, you’ve got a great business to own. At the end of the day, a great business to sell is a great business to own.”
• “What are areas of risk? What makes buyers recoil or say: ‘I don’t want anything to do with that.’ Concentration. Concentration is a huge issue in these businesses. So what is concentration? Concentration is when one person knows everything, does everything, and is the key person to the business. And maybe they have their name all over it. We see this a lot with product-based businesses put out by doctors. Because they got those initials before their name, they’re like: ‘I am going to use my status as a doctor.’ As they should to give authority to this product. It is a great way to launch a product, and it is a bad way to sell a business down the road.”