Buying a website is not an easy thing trust me.? Here is a small list to get you thinking. Someday I will expand each bullet and write more but each . Certainly there is more to this but its a good start.
- Promotional history ( Price drops, increases and product bundling)
- Help Desk System and nature of complaints
- Paid traffic what sources, how much is the budget?
- FREE traffic,( there is nothing called free) what SEO tractics in place?
- Site Tracking & Traffic Measuring: What tools, what duration, how its intrepreted.
- What is the google PR?
- The way the website looked in waybackmachine.org
- BBB standing and its history?
- Domain name has enough seasoning( Registered for the longest time and been registered for a long time)
- Alexa Ranking: Find how much and why its low, if its low?( usually low for non-IM websites)
- Back Links: Check the number of back links to the site
- Content History: Who wrote, How they wrote, Any content used on the site without copyrights or Private Label Rights
- What aspects of the site are outsourced, Vendor contact info and source code access?
- Transferability of Merchant Account, make sure it can be done
- Any DMCA complaints about the site? If there are…determine their relevancy?
- Transferability of Merchant Account. Make sure they do not ask you to open a new merchant account(saving an inquiry will save some personal credit).
- Forum reviews of the site ( clean, controversial, negative?)
- Historic Blog postings ( Who made them, what they said and why they said those)
- Non-Disclosures, Non-Competes and JV Agreements
- Historic Paypal transactions, 1shoppingcart transactions, Affiliate payouts, 3rd payouts
- Non-digital transactions( Income, Expenses, Payouts and Refunds thru Checks)
For Your Continued Success!
Srini Saripalli