Buy Amazon Affiliate Websites that are for Sale – Advanced Due Diligence Tools
If you are looking at where to buy an amazon affiliate website and what to watch out for this post is for you.
I am going to cover…
- 3 Places Amazon Affiliate Websites are for sale
- What to Look For – Advanced Due Diligence Unique to Amazon Affiliate Sites
Best Places to Buy Amazon Affiliate Websites?
If you are looking to purchase an Amazon affiliate website these are a few of the websites you should be looking at…
Flippa – Is the most popular online marketplace for listing websites for sale. However, like any marketplace that doesn’t have a vetting process, it is rampant with issues of sites not being as they appear and a long history of people getting ripped off.
Pro:
- A wide selection of sites for sale
Con:
- Often unverified earnings
- Lots of stories of issues with buying questionable sites (listings are not manually vetted)
- Inefficient to sift through the weak websites to find the diamonds in the rough
- Time-consuming due diligence and auction system
MotionInvest – MotionInvest is a great alternative to Flippa that addresses many of the issues identified above. We started it to provide the most efficient place to buy and sell smaller content websites including Amazon Affiliate sites.
Pro:
- Verified earnings
- Prices reduce following a dutch auction structure ensuring all sites will reduce in price to a fair value vs arbitrarily set pricing.
- Optimized due diligence information and process for content sites
- Experienced Amazon Affiliate site entrepreneurs own/operate the business
- Experienced site transfer team
- Unique growth ideas identified on the listing page to help with the immediate growth of an acquired site
- Post sale support with resources and optional coaching
Con:
- Sites sell quickly and as a result, there is a limited supply of sites
- Seller interviews/calls are not as common for the smaller sites
EmpireFlippers – EmpireFlippers is the largest vetted marketplace for online businesses covering ecommerce, content (affiliate/display), SAAS and FBA businesses.
Pro:
- Verified earnings
- An established transfer process and team
Con:
- A limited supply of sites under $100k
- Lists every type of online business and various sizes. This makes their systems not as optimized for smaller content sites.
BrandBuilders – If you are looking for a starter Amazon Affiliate site have a look at BrandBuilders.io and their selection of pre-made Amazon affiliate sites. It can be a more cost effective way at getting started but shortcutting the build it yourself learning curve.
Advanced Amazon Affiliate Website Due Diligence
In this section, I am going to speak to specific Amazon Affiliate website due diligence checks you should be doing when looking at a website for sale. This does not cover many other aspects of due diligence like google traffic verification, backlink analysis etc. For a complete guide use this one.
Completing proper due diligence on an Amazon Affiliate site is not easy and over the years we have had to build a lot of custom tools to make this level of diligence possible. Not just tools to identify problems on a site but also ones to be able to fix the issues.
Many of these tools are available for free and a link to them is included below. I hope this complete suite of tools we use every day to evaluate Amazon Affiliate sites will help you acquire the right site.
Before you buy an Amazon Affiliate site make sure you complete the following due diligence checks…
- Check for Faked Earnings – If it is just an image of the earnings this can be faked. Very important to get a screen recording of the earnings. A tool like Loom makes this very easy that no one has a reason to not provide.
- Tool – Seller can use Loom to record the earnings
- Check for a Closed Account – If the account of the seller has been suspended by Amazon this will impact your account when you transition the site to your account. You can see this if they do an earnings recording, unless there is a banner saying this account has been closed you are safe.
- Tool – Seller can use Loom to record the earnings which will also show if the account has been closed by Amazon
- Adjust Old Earnings for New Commission Rates – In April 2020 Amazon changed their payout commission resulting in sites that used to be making more having their earnings cut. When buying an Amazon affiliate site make sure to adjust the historical earnings for the new commission structure.
- Tool – Use this free spreadsheet we created to calculate the impact of the earnings change
See what historical earnings would have been with the new commission structure using this free spreadsheet
- Check Amazon Affiliate Requirements Risk – There is a long list of guidelines that you need to comply with to be an Amazon Associate. This can be very difficult to comply with. Many sites may be at risk because they are not complying with the Operating Agreement or Program Policies. Below are a series of tools that can help check if a site is compliant and tools to ensure you become compliant.
- Free Checklist – Amazon Affiliate Requirement deep dive and checklist
- Tool to Scan Pages for a proper Disclaimer – SiteBuddy (free trial)
- Free Plugin – Disclosure for Amazon Affiliate – get compliant in seconds!
Quickly install Amazon Affiliate and Trademark Disclosures Using This Free Plugin
- Check for Missing or Incorrect Amazon Affiliate Tags – If you are linking to Amazon but not using either the correct tag or linking without a tag it means you aren’t being credited with any sales. Even many of the best affiliate sites have issues that need to be fixed!
- TIP – Finding an Amazon Affiliate site for sale that you can identify a lot of missing or incorrect tags provides a huge opportunity to be able to immediately acquire and improve the earnings for the site.
SiteBuddy.io Finds All Amazon Affiliate Links. Use the free trial to fix missing tags or incorrect tags.
If you acquire a site and want to bulk change your links the team at Hekkup.com created a handy tool here.
- Check if it is Linking to a Product Out of Stock – If you are linking to a product that is out of stock then you are likely giving up earnings.
- TIP – Similar to the tags (mentioned above) if you are looking to buy a site and you know it is linking to a lot of products that are out of stock then when you fix those issues you will be able to make more money. SiteBuddy provides a list of all the products you are linking to and which ones are out of stock.
Other Relevant Reading:
- Amazon Affiliate Earnings – Free Spreadsheet to Calculate Earnings Change
- Amazon Affiliate Requirements – How to audit your site to make sure you are compliant
- Amazon Affiliate Disclosure Plugin – Free Plugin to Update you Earnings Disclaimer
- SiteBuddy.io – Amazon Affiliate Link Monitoring Tool
I hope this suite of (mostly) free tools is helpful! If there to are any other tools you use to evaluate Amazon Affiliate specific sites please let me know.
