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How to Find Your Perfect Deal within Minutes

Life is full of searching.

Soul searching. Finding your passion. Looking for your perfect partner. Hunting for that dream job.

Let’s be real—searching is an exhausting uphill climb most of the time. Though most philosophers romanticize the act of searching, for the rest of us real people, searching kind of sucks.

Taking ages searching for anything in the Internet era is just inefficient. We thought that the same truth also applied to finding your perfect business acquisition. That’s why, within our marketplace, we’ve given you the power to hack your way to finding the right business for you within a matter of minutes.

We’re giving you one less thing to search for. This visual guide will walk you through how to make our marketplace generate listings that fit your buying criteria.

Here’s the step-by-step guide to finding your dream deal.

The What and Why of Our Marketplace

The business brokerage industry is decidedly “low tech”.

It’s an odd juxtaposition: across the industry, you can find a listing for the brightest, most advanced online business available, but it will be listed on a marketplace whose core functionality is outdated at best and clunky or elementary at worst.

That’s why we built our own marketplace. We wanted to create a framework to match the caliber of the businesses we were selling.

It didn’t feel right to call ourselves a “marketplace” and be a bunch of clickable links on a page. Sure, that’s how we got started, but that was 10 years ago. If the wild wild west of online business was going to grow and change—so should we.

While a page of listings is the status quo across the industry, putting up a virtual “for sale” sign doesn’t do much for buyers or sellers. We wanted to create the technological tools to make buying and selling easier—filters, alerts, optimizations, chat support, and top security measures.

We decided to move beyond the virtual for sale sign and create technological functions that close deals.

Filters: The Deal Finding Game Changer

The “for sale” pages of most marketplaces have options for you to review but take a needle in a haystack approach to business buying.

With most marketplaces, the onus is on the buyer to actively search through all the listings, one by one. If the buyer is lucky, they might be able to organize listings from biggest to smallest.

But if you’re a sophisticated buyer, you already know what you want, and what you’re looking for isn’t always just a matter of price. You might need to know the age of the business, if a certain monetization fits your portfolio, if the monthly net profit range is what you’re looking for, or all of these combined.

That’s why we added hyper-specific filtering options so you can home in on exactly what you want.

You can go from the needle-in-a-haystack approach to having a business that fits your criteria literally delivered to you. We built in extra functionality for you to create, save, and opt-in to notification emails when businesses go live on the marketplace that match your saved filters.

What used to take hours, days, or months of searching, hoping for the right business acquisition has become as simple as a direct notification of when your perfect business is ready for you to buy.

Let’s get into the step-by-step process of how to do this and get your time back.

How to Filter

Filtering our listings is easy.

Over on the right-hand side of the screen is the filter button.

When you click on the filter function, all of your filter options will appear.

From here, you can start clicking on each section and choosing options that match what you are looking for.

As you can see above, we’ve created six total status options to filter through our listings and you can click multiple options to customize what you want to see. You have an up-to-the-minute look of what’s new, for sale, pending sold, and sold. Your purchases will also show up if you’d like them to. There’s additional color coding for the options for those who love some color-coordinated organization.

The filter options get right to the heart of seeing what you want to see and filtering out everything you don’t.

If you have a series of criteria that fit your target business, you can save it, name it, and have it ready to go every time you look at our marketplace.

Having these new filters in place will save you having to repeatedly sift through our marketplace, because you’ll have already filtered your way to the right deal.

Top Filters to Find the Perfect Deal

Now you know how to filter, but we won’t stop there. There are the filters that can streamline your buying search and make it a breeze:

Maximum / Minimum Listing Price filter

It’s disappointing when you see something you love and realize it’s out of your price range. We’re cutting down on that by offering you the ability to plug in your budget bandwidth.

Everyone has a specific deal size range they work with for reasons beyond how much money you might have in the bank.

Maybe you don’t want deals below 50K because you’re not interested in the work it might take to get such businesses above six figures. Maybe you only want deals close to seven figures in hopes of growing them to catch the eyes of private equity buyers.

You know your price range and you know why a business at a certain price meets your goals. Now you can narrow down all the options to fit your specific range.

Monetization

While some buyers are open-ended on how an online business is monetized, most people only want businesses that match their skillset.

If you’re an FBA pro, you’re going to want only these options. If you’re looking for a flipping opportunity, you might be looking for an affiliate or Adsense business.

We have 18 monetizations to choose from, and you can select multiple if you want a multi-monetized business.

Niche

Again, many buyers want to buy something they have knowledge of or interest in, which brings niches into play.

Niches are an important part of successful content-based businesses and even e-commerce businesses. Offering niche-specific solutions and products can help drive revenue. A niche can also be a powerful level to pull for portfolio strategists looking for bolt-on or strategic acquisitions for their existing businesses. The right niche can mean the right opportunities when scaling a business or your digital empire.

It makes sense to narrow things down by niche so you can work with what you want and skip over what you don’t.

You can get laser-focused on your niche search by choosing from any of our 57 niche options.

Maximum / Minimum Monthly Net Profit

Just like with filtering the listing price, you can now filter out sites with multiples that are too high for your range.

You may also have an idea of the minimum you want coming in from your asset every month, so this option will help you cut right to businesses at your desired level.

Other Filters to Speed up your Search

You have even more options available to get hyper-specific with your filtering. Here are all the other choices you have for your filter settings:

Uses PBN

PBNs are a contested subject. While some buyers are avid fans, others avoid them at all costs. This make-it-or-break-it detail for some buyers is now available for filtering.

Trademark

Trademarks are an indicator of brand stability and signs that a brand is legally protected. They make a big difference in the world of ecommerce, especially with Amazon FBA’s Brand Registry 2.0. Many buyers will only consider a trademarked business, which is why we added this to our search criteria.

Business Creation Date

Some buyers want to see years behind the business they are buying, since they deem those less risky ventures. It makes sense because the whole point of buying a business is to see some sort of established earnings in it. If you’re the kind of buyer that wants a certain number of months or years behind the business you buy, you can now see all the businesses within the age range you’re looking for.

Watchlist

The watchlist filter is one of our favorites.

The watchlist is a collection of all the listings you’ve given a Thumbs Up, if you went through the marketplace and saw some listings you liked. The watchlist helps you keep an eye on them so you won’t miss out on your favorite listings.

The watchlist also goes both ways. You can select Thumbs Down to weed out listings you don’t want to view but also keep that list organized for any further review in the watchlist filter.

New Listings

Our latest listings go live every Monday at 10am EST and now you can filter the newest live businesses under the New Listings option.

Make sure not to miss out by getting notified with an email when new listings go live. If you haven’t done so yet, you can register for a free marketplace account today so we can keep you in the loop.

Using Filters as Notifications

Filters help you sift through deals fast but they also make sure you don’t miss a single opportunity.

When your filters are set and saved, you’ll receive email updates when businesses match your criteria. You have the option to enable to disable the email notification function when saving your filter.

When you’re alerted about deals that match you, you’ll be able to hop right back into the marketplace to get started on due diligence.

How This Changes the Buying Experience and Deals

We all want a shortcut when it comes to getting what we want.

That’s why hacks are so popular. If there’s a better way of doing something, wouldn’t we all want to go that route?

Our filter function is the ultimate business buying hack.

No more losing time searching for your right business. You can look for exactly what you want and act faster. Instead of searching, you can get to building your digital asset.

Filtering is not just a game-changer for buyers—sellers benefit from our marketplace capabilities as well. By giving buyers the tools to find deals that match their criteria, they are much keener to close on a business when they start their due diligence.

Ultimately, both sides get a faster, streamlined deal process, which means both sides win.

We like to help buyers and sellers win in the deal process. If you’re ready to make your move and want to sell your business on our marketplace, you can submit your business directly or give us a call to talk it over. If you’re a buyer who wants to discuss your buying criteria with us, set up a conversation with our team of business analysts who can guide you through the buying process.