OK, before I start this rant, I warn you that I see something that I think is bad, I can be a real asshole, mostly because I think whatever it is I’m ranting about needs a serious reality check and while everyone around is saying good things and being supportive, I feel there needs to be someone dishing out the reality of the situation, and I’m prepared to be that person. Not out of hate, but to really give whoever a reality check in the hope that they see the error of their ways, and either change profession, or step up their game a whole heap (go back to school).

Today’s ‘why the fuck would anyone buy this’ rant, is about http://www.bidcheap2u.com/

It’s for sale over at sitepoint, http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/36780 with a BIN of $6,000… and starting bid of $2,500…

It pulls 500 page views a month – 60 uniques – which is about right for search engine bot traffic, not people… Mostly what’s being sold is the code, he custom wrote it, and honestly so what?

There’s heaps of ebay – auction style scripts around that do all that his would do – and probably more, and not to mention, since he’s the only developer and he’s selling the site with code as a once off thing, if there’s bugs, errors, issues, and anything else, then you can’t get support, you don’t have updates, you will have to hire a developer to decipher his code, and then work out the issue.

This site is a liability, not an investment.

He should be selling the code to other developers with resell rights, or an exclusive sale, not a site on sitepoint. Or he should be selling a hosted solution and a singular marketplace, a single auction site with your own code is just pointless, it’s like buying a Russian custom built one of a kind car which you will need to manually comply to drive in your own country, and then find a Russian mechanic who can fix it when there’s issues.

Actually, I might start valuing things for sale on sitepoint and wherever else I see them, because as a designer, developer, investor, business owner, and whatever else I am / have been, I think I have a good grasp on the value of a site for sale. I’ve built them, sold them, bought them, invested in them and disowned them.