Empire Flippers is the most talked-about premium marketplace for online businesses. Here's the full honest picture — who it's for, what the process is like, and whether the fees are justified.
Empire Flippers launched in 2012 and has become the benchmark that other website marketplaces are measured against. It's not the most accessible platform — the typical listing starts at $100,000 and the buyer deposit requirement alone filters out casual browsers — but for what it does, it does it better than anyone else in the market.
Unlike open marketplaces where anyone can list anything, Empire Flippers operates as a full-service brokerage. Sellers submit their businesses, and Empire Flippers' team conducts an extensive due diligence process before anything goes live. This includes verifying revenue against actual platform data, reviewing traffic history, assessing the business model, and building a detailed listing profile that gives buyers a far more complete picture than any other marketplace provides.
To access the full details of any listing — including the domain, financials, and operational specifics — buyers need to submit a refundable deposit (typically a few hundred dollars, applied to the purchase price if you proceed). This friction is intentional: it keeps tire-kickers out and ensures sellers are only interacting with genuinely interested, qualified buyers.
The depth of information in an Empire Flippers listing is genuinely different from what you'll find elsewhere. Revenue is shown month by month for the past 12+ months. Traffic is broken down by source. The business model is explained in detail. The owner provides an overview of operations, time requirements, and growth opportunities. You get a realistic picture of what you're actually buying before you spend a dollar.
Empire Flippers charges sellers a tiered commission (typically 15% at lower values, decreasing as deal size increases). Buyers pay a 2-5% buyer premium depending on the deal size. These fees are higher than most alternatives, but for transactions in the $100,000-$1,000,000 range, the confidence and support they provide typically justifies the cost.
Empire Flippers has a dedicated migration team that manages the transfer of every business they sell. This includes moving websites between hosting providers, transferring domain ownership, handing over ad network and affiliate accounts, and providing operational handover documentation. For complex multi-platform businesses, this support is genuinely valuable — the kind of transfer that could take weeks to coordinate independently is handled systematically by people who do it every day.
If you have serious capital to deploy ($100,000+), have already bought and operated at least one online business successfully, and want the highest-confidence acquisition process available — Empire Flippers is the right platform. The fees are real, the deposit requirement is real, and the minimum deal size is real. But so is the quality of what you get: businesses that have been genuinely vetted, detailed financial documentation, and professional support through a complex transaction.
Motion Invest offers similar vetting standards for businesses in the $500-$100,000 range — a better fit for most first-time and early-stage buyers.
Browse Motion Invest → See all alternatives →