Fully Functional Website Marketplace - Review My Site

**jawzishere** · 01-27-2008 04:01 PM

Hello, My partner and I have been working on this site very seriously for the last 3-4 months.

Buy Websites and Sell Websites at Buy Established Websites

We feel that there's a big hole in the website marketplace industry that can be and needs to be filled by a website like ours.

Our key features include:
-Manual Approval (to make sure all websites listed are established)
-Escrow Payments (to avoid fraud)
-Feedback System (to give credit to honest buyers and sellers)
-Effective Search (to allow people to find the exact sites they're looking for)

Our secondary features include:
-A support forum
-Free listings
-Featured websites
-Buy it now and bidding functions
-Various information resources
-Blog
-Detailed website listings

Our goal is to become the leader in the website marketplace industry and eventually be competing directly with SitePoint.

We have poured our time and money into building this site and need to know how we can improve it that much more before we launch (in around a month).

Please register at our site and review the backend of it as well as this is the main functionality that needs to be tested.

All your help is very much appreciated. Also if you have a website you'd like to list when we launch, shoot me a PM so I know of your interest.

For the first 100 sites there will be no fees at all so you'll make 100% profit off the sale of your site.

Things you should know:
*We are currently having a new header and logo designed for our site. (We already know that our current header sucks

)

*We plan on dropping a good sum of money on our launch to really kick it off.

**webgal** · 01-27-2008 04:46 PM

It looks nice, proffessional and credible which is important. You know who your competition is and that's good. You have a working site, I know it took a lot of work. But the front is too generic. You have 8 seconds to get their attention or you won't have any one looking at the back end. Don't sink money into marketing until you have gotten the landing page to speak to the target. Otherwise, those funds will fall in a black hole.

Where you have this:

Welcome To
Buy Established Websites

You need a kick butt headline there. Drill down the number one benefit and create your marketing strategy. Write that out. It doesn't have to be a work of literary art. Then take that strategy and turn it into a benefit.

Example below of a headline makeover I did for dog food. The name is made up but I got the example from a real website. And the original headline was something like-

Original: OrganicDog for your dog's health.

Headline with a longevity/health message benefit.

Makeover: Dogs fed OrganicDog offer unconditional love to their owners an average of 5 years longer than dogs fed commercial pet food.

That's not your product obviously, but it takes the benefit of health/longevity and turns it into a benefit to the owner, the person buying the food. It speaks to the target market.

You need to zero in on what it is you offer this target market and sell that. What type of people are those who buy or sell websites? Identify them. And I mean REALLY find out who they are.

Those bullet points up in your post, where are they on your front page? Bump down featured websites on the left and get them up there. Or get them on the page some place. You need to sell you first, before you can get me to check out the listings.

I will tell you that the scammers are rampant on these type of sites. So rampant the FBI can't even investigate really high dollar crimes of fraud. So any safety checks will be important. Anything you have for those listing so you can get a true idea of traffic that they post.

Your tagline says what you do but it's weak. It's a starting point, though. You start with this idea and work it. At least I know what you do when I go to the site. If you can't come up with anything, at least replace revolution with something of value. Revolution is too much patting yourselves on the back.

**cutebeast** · 01-28-2008 12:10 AM

1. Navigation is confusing. Each time I press sell website, it bring me to another think to click and back to the main page.
2. You might want to built up an aggressive marketing team to get more owner to list their site with you by offering them cheaper price.
3. The SitePoint you mention is more of Community approach while you are more direct into the Biz. So I think both the driving force and direction are different.
4. Beside navigation problem, lack of listing (boring) - I don't see how you going to win the rest of other site. Do you have a strategy? Your own PR is 2 yet you still don't go for ppc? Most of listing are of PR 0, now this is a problem. Seriously you might want to start drafting out on how you going to market this and maybe even charges for different PR.

**gregdavidson** · 01-28-2008 01:04 AM

Not bad, but I don't think it has a trustworthy or professional look. For the purpose of the website, I don't think you can afford to cut corners if you want it to work out.

**Woodcs82** · 01-28-2008 06:41 PM

I wish you much luck my friend, but there are a lot of sites out there like that. What sets you apart from the others out there?

-C

**Wowzerz** · 01-28-2008 06:49 PM

There are so many typos on the first page that I couldn't go any further.

**jawzishere** · 01-29-2008 12:05 AM

webgal: Thanks very much for the indepth review of the site. There's a lot of great information in there. I'll definitely work on trying to draw in my target audience with better wording on the homepage.

cutebeast: Thanks for pointing that out. We're obviously still working out the kinks. That link only works once you are logged in.

gregdavidson: Yea, right now it isn't the best but we are currently working on the redesign with a new header, customized logo, better looking nav bar and cleaner site. After that we should come across as professional and trustworthy.

Woodcs82: I listed everything that sets us apart in bullet points in my post. But in actuality there really aren't too many website marketplace sites, it's a very unsaturated market.

Wowzerz: Yea, my partner doesn't have the best gammar/spelling but I'll be rewriting that before launch.
----------------------

Thank you all for your responses. Now I'd like to get some feedback on the interior of the site. Is the navigation confusing? Does it have everything you'd expect? Is it missing something?

**webgal** · 03-28-2008 05:26 PM

I've exchanged emails with this site owner. He gave this a lot of thought and his second attempt was admirable. I used it as a case study.

We looked at separating him from his competitors and pointing out what it is this site offers that no one else does. If you can do this successfully, you can excel in a competitive market.

It's long so I did not reproduce it all here. It's also a process that few follow and I pretty much put the brainstorming on the page so you get an idea of how to do it. Make your comments at:

WebPrepPro Blog — Target your Market. Get your website to speak to your niche.