For SaleI regularly scan various resources for new possible ecommerce and other online businesses to buy, such as Flippa, a selection of webmaster forums, Sitepoint and other classifieds. But one of my least favourite places is eBay.

The reason I don’t like eBay is because of the amount of ridiculous listings. People trying to sell terrible domains, they will register something such as michael-jackson-family-forever.net and then make a listing saying it is incredibly value because of the words contained within it and it could be yours for just £25,000! I don’t even want to begin to describe the sort of people who do this and significantly reduce the quality of the ‘Businesses For Sale’ category on eBay.

But having said that I do scan the site every now and then as it does also have genuine listings, whether they be online or offline (you often see mobile businesses such as vans which sell sandwiches etc). And ironically, the site I like least for finding opportunities, turned up one of the best ones I’ve seen.

It was an ecommerce site selling electrical goods such as wireless speakers and surround sound systems. It is receiving 14,000 unique highly targetted visitors per month thanks to some brilliant rankings in Google for some competitive terms, and has been doing so for 3 years! That is where all the value is as the actual website is not very good and is has traffic from no other sources. The words ‘huge opportunity’ were soon swirling around constantly in my brain as he didn’t want a great deal of money for it. I contacted the seller direct, and by the end of the next day we had done a deal as he wanted a quick sale to invest in another business of his. 2 weeks down the line and I’m incredibly happy with the acquisition, especially as we approach christmas sales time!

There is definitely a lesson here, although the eBay category gets filled with rubbish, there are some gems. So be careful about dismissing certain methods and resources you use for finding new opportunities for your business.