What it costs to sell a small online business

We are quoting a real, current fee schedule rather than a market average, because a market average of selling costs is not something we can measure. With the Sub $10K asking-price band selected, Flippa's pricing page states a 10% success fee and three self-service listing packages: “$29 Flat Fee 60-day term”, “$49 Flat Fee three-month term”, and “$199 per 6 months”. Its own FAQ summarises the range as “The Entry Level Package starts at $29 and success fees start from 5%.” (source, read 17 September 2026)

Read that for exactly what it is: what one marketplace publishes about its own prices on the day we looked. It is not a measurement of what selling costs across the market, we have not audited it, and other venues publish other schedules we have not quoted here. What it is good for is arithmetic — a concrete, stated, checkable set of numbers to hold against the sale prices we do measure.

Loading live median sold prices from /api/stats…

Two honest caveats about that table. The prices are medians of the sold comps we hold across every source we collect from — not of one venue's sales — so this is the published schedule applied to the market's observed prices, not a report of what any particular seller paid. And a median is the middle of a wide distribution: sell at the top of your category's range and the fee share is a fraction of what it is at the middle. The range itself is on what small online businesses sell for.

A success fee is contingent: no sale, no fee, and a seller's interests and the venue's point the same way. A listing fee is not. It is paid up front, it buys a fixed window — sixty days on the entry package — and it is spent whether the listing closes at your number, closes at half your number, or closes at nothing at all.

That is a perfectly ordinary commercial arrangement, and it is worth noticing what it means at this size: the listing fee is a bet on your own sale. If the median outcome in your category is a few hundred dollars, a $29 stake is a real fraction of the prize, and a relist adds to it — the same page prices relists at half rate, not free. What share of listings sell at all is something our data cannot tell you: we only ever see the ones that did, which is the whole shape of our sample. Treat a sell-through rate quoted at you as unverified unless the source states how it was counted.

The two fees above are the ones with a published number next to them. Several other costs are real and are not in that column:

• Payment and escrow. The venue's schedule lists escrow and payment options as features; what the payment provider charges is the provider's own published rate, on the provider's own page. Look it up for the rail you will actually use before you price the deal — we have not quoted a figure here because we have not verified one.
• Optional add-ons. On the same sub-$10K band, confidentiality is priced: the page lists an “NDA & Confidentiality” add-on at $199 on the two cheaper packages and free on the premium one. Anything you add moves the fixed cost up, and the fixed cost is the part that hurts at these prices.
• Your time in the handover. Migrating hosting, transferring a domain, moving payment and ad accounts, and answering a buyer's questions for a fortnight after the money lands are unpriced but not free. At a $500 sale they can exceed every fee on this page put together.
• What the price included in the first place. Before you net anything off, check what was being sold: inventory, cash, and stock left in the deal all change the number the fee is charged on. That distinction has its own page — what a headline sale price actually includes.