How do you gauge how much a website is worth

Mr_Wistles

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I own a wholesale company that imports pet products from China.

I have recently been approached by the owner of www.petsupplies.co.uk, he wants 2k for it.

Do you think that it is worth it?
 
Depends on how many customers he gets from his site. How much revenue does his site bring in, how many repeat customers does he have?
 
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www.petsupplies.co.uk]Last[/url] modified: September 29, 2002

doesnt seem very busy.

whats your site address atm?

EDIT: The guestbook is signed by people who seem just to be promoting their own sites and products.
 
unless your trying to benefit from traffic already going to that address you are probably better off thinking of another name, such as petsupplieRs.co.uk - with the added R - as this will work out much cheaper. a dot com is better than .co.uk i think
 
Is it just the name or the whole site contents, software and infrastructure. I take it just the name from the price.

If your company is called Pet Supplies you would have a fair chance of getting it from him (at domain costs) anyway through the registration company unless he had an equally close name and could argue his case.

Depends if it is worth it. I would say 2K for something that you are just renting anyway would depend on what your perception of the value of the branding is as well as how much current traffic the site gets.

Have a look on google by typing in "pet supplies uk" without the quotes and see if the domain comes near the top. If it does then it is getting a fair amount of interest. If not it may not be well known at all. Try with the other search engines as well including to see if it is listed at yahoo under the right category or not. These things alone may be worth the cash for the domain name.
 
unique said:
a dot com is better than .co.uk i think

Not if your target market is the UK.

£2,000 is expensive for just a name as there doesn't seem to be much goodwill attached to the site in terms of quality inbound links.

petsupplies-uk.co.uk is available but whilst it would only cost a few pounds to register it wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the Google rankings for at least a year due to the "sandbox" effect. You could still use it with Google Adwords though.
 
Quick check on Google suggests he's nowhere.

If he's asking £2k for the name alone I'd say it isn't worth anything, in my opinion. As other people have suggested you'll be able to get close to that name anyways by adding '-uk' to the end.

It's what you do with the domain that counts i.e. getting it to the top of the search engines.

EDIT: he's not actually nowhere... just on page 3 of Google. I Should have looked further.
 
Surely the point of owning a particular domain name is not to intercept people who already visit that site, but to intercept people who don't know which site they're looking for but just guess at an address and type it straight in? The question is how many people who haven't yet bought pet supplies online would try typing in www.petsupplies.com to see where that link sends them, and how many of them will be looking for something that you actually sell.
 
NicolasB said:
Surely the point of owning a particular domain name is not to intercept people who already visit that site, but to intercept people who don't know which site they're looking for but just guess at an address and type it straight in? The question is how many people who haven't yet bought pet supplies online would try typing in www.petsupplies.com to see where that link sends them, and how many of them will be looking for something that you actually sell.

That may have been truer a few years ago but I'd bet more people use search engines to generate a list to choose from rather than typing in a generic URL to 'see what happens'.

Since the site does appear in Google I think the value of the domain depends on how much time and effort would be involved to boost the ranking of this existing domain vs getting a new domain off the ground.

As Ian rightly says a new domain is basically invisible for a few months.

BTW Russell do you have an existing website?
 
Cheers for the advice everyone. I agree that the times have changed from when people just typed in random urls.

Yes I do have a website at the moment

www.plutospets.com /.co.uk

Please feel free to critique it as much as possible as my web designer is a lazy git.
 
I've seen a lot of worse sites. My only initial comment would be to improve the search site box. Make it more prominent, and make it so that when you click ANYWHERE in the text area, the default text disappears and the cursor is ready to type. This is very popular with people like myself - i.e. lazy!

Incidentally, depending on where your business is at in a few years' time (and if you decide to stock cat goods, too) I might get in touch with you, as I'm still thinking about taking on an existing cattery business. We'll see how that pipe dream shapes up!
 
Russell_Piper said:
Please feel free to critique it as much as possible

Google places great importance on keywords and phrases that come early in the page title and page description and most SEO companies will put the most important keyword first.

Your title is "Plutos Pets - " which is a waste of a valuable resource as it will rank far better for people searching for information about planets in the solar system than it will about pet supplies. If you must have the company name it should come at the end so that the title reads someting like "pet supplies and pet products from plutos pets".

Likewise the site description of "Plutos Pets, Importers & Wholesalers Of Quality Pet Products......." is also the wrong way round as "Pluto", "importers", "wholesalers" and "quality" are far less important than what you actually supply.

Try changing it to something like "Pet products and supplies, dog toys, something else, something else all available online from plutos pets, importers and wholesalers of quality pet products"
 

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