I sold Weights.com today for $36,500 and lost money on it. But, I am fine with that. Here’s why:
I bought the Weights.com domain name for $32,000 in March of 2012. It currently appraises for $284,000 on Estibot.com, and I think it appraised for around that back then also. I did not have any grand plans for it, but I figured I could always at least sell it for what I paid for it. My goal was either to flip the domain for a big profit (I was thinking I might get $100,000 for it if I found the right buyer), or if that did not work I would create a site on it and make lots of money. Over 2 years has passed, and both of those objectives were a total failure. I never got any good offers on my own for the domain, and when I tried selling it through domain brokers all of the offers were around what I paid for it.
I also tried setting up an article type site on Weights.com, using WordPress, and paid for 100 custom written articles about weight lifting and fitness, but the site hardly got any more visitors than when I just had the domain parked. It could be that I am just bad at SEO, but I think the only way to really use Weights.com is to build a real site on it, like selling fitness equipment. Or, it could be the home page for a company that sells weights offline (my guess is that weights are not the best product to have to ship).
On the $36,500 sale, I paid a 20% commission (10% to Flippa.com, 5% to the primary broker who handled the Flippa sale for me, and 5% to a co-broker), so my net was only $29,200. That is almost $3000 less than I paid. I think it was a great deal for the buyer, but I had shopped it around enough to know that I probably wouldn’t get that much higher for it, so I figured I might as well sell it while I had somebody who wanted to make a deal.
The main point of all of this is that once I had done everything I wanted to do with the domain (and failed), it was worth a lot less to me than it was when I first owned it. I am happy I got to try out Weights.com, and I don’t at all regret buying it.
Thanks Eric for sharing your weights.com story. You had the courage to share the loss in your investment which normally people hide and that’s what I always like about you. Profit/loss is part of business so that’s fine.
Thanks once again š
Congratulations on selling Symphony.com!
Thanks Eric š
I sold the name to you in 2012, Iād owned it 7 years or so (bought for $25,000 in 2005). Sorry to hear you didn’t make money. Personally I find that about 1/3 of everything I sell is at a loss, but I think it is good idea to do house cleaning when needed.
If you add up all the commission made by auction houses and brokers over the three sales that I know of, it is far more than has been made in terms of profit/loss by the owners of this name. Looks like approximately $14,600 has been made by brokers/auction houses over the last three sales. Whilst the owners have in total lost $1000. (I made a couple of thousand selling it-lousy return over 7 years, about 1% per year). Though it would have done ok with parking over that period. (Iād have to really dig around to try and work that side of it out though.)
So at the end of the day it is actually the very significant costs to sell that have chewed through all the capital gains in this example.
Interesting info, thanks. The real key is for an end user to build a legitimate site on the domain, instead of speculators like us owning it.
I have weights.us if anyone is interested.. see whois for my email.
I have weightkg.com.
I recently subscribed to this blog and would like to ask the readers a question… Can any of you share your experiences selling domain names on Flippa.com? I have been selling there (off and on) and don’t seem to have much luck. It appears that the exposure of the domain name is limited without paying the high price for a premium listing. Am I seeing this correctly?
Yep shipping weights would not be cheap, but you wouldn’t really have to worry about them getting broken. haha My sister works at fedex and gets a 75% discount, if you could get a deal like that it would probably be a pretty good business. Still might be a hard business because you can buy weight all over the place in any town or city. Next time you are trying to find something to buy where you live and you can’t find it and you have to go online that is probably the perfect product domain name to buy! š
Thanks for this post, Eric.
@Reggie, connect with me directly for help selling on Flippa…