another $20 lost

[karmstrn]

Well, make it another $20 I've blown through the Thirty Day Challenge. I sold a site on Flippa for $125. I thought that was great, until I tried to transfer the site to the new owner. That process is anything but simple. After wrangling with Godaddy and the great Hostgator for over a month, we still couldn't get the site transferred, so the buyer asked for his money back on Paypal and I had to give it to him. So, now I'm out $20 for the listing on Flippa. This is incredibly frustrating.

[slowandsteady]

what sort of problems did you have? and was it mainly with godaddy or hostgator?

[DeanRichards]

Why did you list a site on Flippa knowing that you lacked the ability to do the transfer and fulfill the contract? Doesn't that seem just a little bit premature on your part?

I also see that you posted a request for help and then less than an hour later told people to not worry because you had found what you needed and then you never posted again, all the time knowing that there were knowledgeable, experienced and willing people here that could have helped you.

It's a shame you had a bad experience, especially since it could have been so easily avoided.

[karmstrn]

I thought Flippa was going to help with the process of transferring the site, but they don't offer any assistance at all in that. I also thought I'd found the answer to how to transfer the site to the new owner via Wordpress direct, but the buyer wouldn't give me the info I requested. He wanted to do it on his terms. So you have to become an expert on how to transfer a site from one owner to another before trying to sell one on Flippa? That's news to me. I didn't think it was supposed to be such a convoluted process.

[DeanRichards]

You made absolutely no effort at all to educate yourself about the process before you jumped in. You made a bunch of bad assumptions and you paid the price. Learn from it and move on. You still own the site and you can still sell it again, only this time you know that you need to be more careful about how you do it.

1) Here is the step by step on how to do the domain transfer. You can put information about this in your auction listing and tell buyers what they are expected to do to complete the domain transfer. It will build your credibility and make you look more professional.

Moving a Domain Name out of Your Account

2) Here is the step by step of how to do the Wordpress transfer. Say in your listing that buyers must have a C-Panel based hosting account and they will need to give you temporary access to make the transfer.

How To Move Wordpress To A New Server Or Host

It looks more complicated than it really is. You can do a "test run" by creating a sub-domain and copying your site to it. Once you've done it and verified it all works, you can delete the sub domain.

You don't need to be some sort of alpha geek expert to transfer a site. You just need to know one way of doing it that works and say in your listing that this is the way it is going to work or they are on their own. It's your way or the highway. No big deal.

As a marketer, I'm smelling an opportunity here. Stay tuned for my free video on how to transfer Wordpress blogs

[Matthias]

I knew it, Dean! I bet we can expect some great information(product) about transfering websites very soon.

I completely agree with Dean Richards here, one should get the required information before jumping to action, but I'm not going to judge you. I've made many rookie mistakes myself.

See it like this: You've just spend $20 on a very valuable lesson. That's not much money in my oppinion for a learning experience.

Many people haven't even listed a site on Flippa yet, so why do you worry yourself with $20?

[karmstrn]

"You made absolutely no effort at all to educate yourself about the process before you jumped in. You made a bunch of bad assumptions and you paid the price."

What I did was follow the directions given in the Thirty Day Challenge. They didn't say anything about educating yourself on the technogeek process of transferring a website. As you just admitted, more information is needed on that. Get it out there before more people go through what I did.

[mspearman]

I understand your frustration. I've built websites for years, but never transferred them. Wordpress websites are very simple to transfer when you have the correct instructions, and those instructions are all over the web. The problem with the instructions is that slight changes and differences throw a new user off enough to get frustrated.

There are quite a few ways to do it, but the easiest is to just pay for some help! I would have done it for $25 if you provided me with the Cpanel access to both accounts. I would have told you what I did so you didn't have to pay someone next time either.

I'm not a guru, but I know my way around. In the 30 Day Challenge, I've struggled with other aspects like finding niches and promotion, but I ask people how it's done and research.

If you made it all the way through the process and created a $125 site from scratch you've done something! You threw the towel in right before your last knockout punch! When you finally figure out how to do this, you're going to kick yourself.

My suggestion is to buy a baby account or ask someone to let you set up a test account on their reseller account and give it a try again without the stress of a customer waiting on their website.

[scott33]

sory for your experience