Disclosure. We have no affiliate or partnership arrangement with Empire Flippers and earn nothing if you use them. I am a registered user who has browsed their marketplace for years and has submitted a business to them, though I did not go on to list. We do partner with a broker in a different part of this market, and that is disclosed on the pages where it applies.
Empire Flippers rejects 91% of the businesses that apply to list. That is their own published number, from their own data, and it is the single most useful fact about the company.
Everything else about them follows from it. The 15% commission is high. The buyer pool is real. The listings mostly sell. Those three things are connected, and the connection is the vetting.
I have been writing about small business economics for over two decades, and I have watched a lot of marketplaces try to solve the trust problem in this space. Empire Flippers solved it by throwing away nine out of ten sellers. Whether that is worth 15% to you depends entirely on which side of the door you are standing.
15% is a lot. Make sure it is the right 15%
Empire Flippers is one of eleven routes to selling an online business, and it is the right one for a specific profile. We compared all of them on real published fees, minimum deal sizes and who each one actually serves.
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Empire Flippers at a glance
| Detail | |
|---|---|
| What it is | Curated marketplace for online businesses. Vetted listings, published prices. |
| Founded | May 2011, originally as AdSense Flippers, by Justin Cooke and Joe Magnotti |
| CEO | Andy Allaway, who joined in 2017 and took the role by late 2024 |
| Listing fee | None |
| Commission | 15% under $700k, 8% on the portion $700k to $5M, 2.5% above $5M |
| Minimum commission | $10,000 |
| Minimum to list | $2,000 a month net profit, twelve month average |
| Rejection rate | 91% |
| Exclusivity | Two months |
| Lifetime volume | $604.2 million across 2,665 businesses sold |
| Average time to sale | 127 days |
| Trustpilot | ★★★★☆ 4.2 from 114 reviews |
The fee, and the trap inside it
There is no cost to submit or list. The commission is tiered and blended, which is fairer than a flat rate on larger deals:
| Sale price band | Commission on that portion |
|---|---|
| Under $700,000 | 15% |
| $700,000 to $5,000,000 | 8% |
| Above $5,000,000 | 2.5% |
So a $1,000,000 sale is not 15%. It is 15% on the first $700,000 and 8% on the remaining $300,000, which works out at $105,000 plus $24,000, or $129,000, an effective 12.9%.
Here is the part people miss. There is a $10,000 minimum commission. On a $40,000 sale, 15% would be $6,000, but you pay $10,000. That is an effective 25%. The minimum stops biting at $66,667. Below roughly $70,000, Empire Flippers is one of the most expensive ways to sell an online business, and the marketing does not lead with that.
| Sale price | What you pay | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $40,000 | $10,000 | 25.0% |
| $66,667 | $10,000 | 15.0% |
| $200,000 | $30,000 | 15.0% |
| $1,000,000 | $129,000 | 12.9% |
| $5,000,000 | $449,000 | 9.0% |
The 91% rejection rate, and what it does and does not mean
Empire Flippers published the data behind this, which almost nobody in the industry does. The sample was 6,413 submissions between July 2020 and June 2021. Only 9% passed.
The breakdown is more interesting than the headline:
- 64% never got past the five minute check. They failed on basics before a human looked closely.
- 31% failed ID verification. That is the single biggest rejection reason, and it tells you what they are really filtering for.
- 25% did not earn enough or lacked sufficient trading history.
Read that again. The top reason for rejection is not business quality. It is sellers who could not or would not prove who they are. That is a fraud filter, and it is the thing buyers are actually paying the commission for.
What you need to get in
- $2,000 a month in net profit, averaged over twelve months (their older seller page still says $1,500, the requirement appears to have been raised)
- Twelve months of revenue history minimum
- Google Analytics or Clicky running for at least three months before you apply
- Ad-dependent sites must have been on the same domain for the full twelve months
- Service businesses need at least 50% of revenue from multiple clients
- Financials for up to three years, or the life of the business, whichever is longer
Prohibited outright: adult, gambling, payday loans, hacking, CBD and hemp oil, and what they politely call dubious medical claims. Automatic rejection for penalised domains, short term 301 redirect boosts and artificially inflated social metrics.
Vetting takes three to four weeks typically. A small affiliate site can be through in about a week. A product based ecommerce business can take the full four.
What “vetted” does not cover
This is the most important thing in this review for buyers, and it comes from Empire Flippers’ own Terms of Use.
“Empire does not independently verify the expenses of the Business.”
Revenue gets verified. Traffic gets verified. Identity gets verified hard. Expenses do not. And expenses are exactly where a seller inflates profit, because overstating net profit is a subtraction problem, not an addition one.
A few more clauses worth knowing before you buy:
- There is no third party escrow. Buyers deposit the purchase price with Empire Flippers, who hold it as broker.
- “All sales are final and we make no guarantees, expressed or implied.”
- Buyers in default forfeit their deposit with no refund entitlement.
- Empire Flippers makes no warranty about future performance of what you buy.
None of that is unusual for a broker. It is unusual to market a 91% rejection rate as hard as they do while disclaiming the accuracy of what survives it. Both things are true at once, and a buyer should hold both.
Migration, and the inspection period nobody defines
Empire Flippers runs a dedicated migrations department, which genuinely is a differentiator. No other broker in this space staffs a whole team for asset transfer, and they claim over two thousand migrations completed.
Timelines from their own pages, and they do not agree with each other:
- Terms of Use: “typically takes 2 to 8 weeks to complete, but could take substantially longer”, with no guaranteed timeframe
- Migrations overview: “three to eight weeks”, with Amazon FBA at the long end
- Seller FAQ: from sale to seller payment, “1-3 weeks on average”
One detail buyers should know: during the migration period, all revenue the business earns goes to the buyer, not the seller.
On the inspection period, I went looking for a defined length and could not find one. The Terms of Use define no inspection period at all. In practice, first hand buyer accounts describe roughly a two week window with a revenue threshold the business has to hit to pass. Their own podcast discusses it as a negotiable term. So treat it as customary rather than contractual, and get the length and the pass threshold in writing before you fund.
Once you release the funds, it is over. Their own framing on the podcast: once the seller gets paid, the deal is done.
Ratings and what people actually complain about
| Platform | Score | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Trustpilot | ★★★★☆ 4.2 | 114 |
| Glassdoor (employees) | ★★★★☆ 4.3 | 41 |
| BBB | No profile found | n/a |
| Google Business Profile | None found | n/a |
No BBB file and no Google profile is consistent with what they are: a Delaware LLC with a fully distributed team and no physical office. Their careers page describes the staff as digital nomads. There is no shopfront for anyone to review.
The Trustpilot score of 4.2 from 114 reviews is decent but thin for a company that has closed 2,665 deals. The complaints that are there fall into clear patterns.
The real complaints
Losing control of your own listing. One seller had their account closed for going offline for a few days and for raising their asking price after seeing buyer interest, and described it as “not a free marketplace.” That is the flip side of curation: they run the process, not you.
Cold outreach. A September 2025 reviewer reported being contacted five or six times over two months about selling a business they never wanted to sell.
Late surprises in the deal. A more measured three star review flagged three concrete process failures: an unexpected counter offer after a “best and final”, undisclosed inventory costs added later, and a deviation from the agreed transfer process.
Expertise outside their core. Two separate reviewers felt the team was strong on small ecommerce and weaker elsewhere, one describing it as “dealing with amateurs” despite premium fees.
The counterweight, from someone who actually sold
Nate Shivar sold his site through Empire Flippers in 2021 and wrote it up in detail. His verdict on the fee is the fair one: every dollar in their pocket is a dollar less in yours, and their transition team alone was worth it. His main criticism is not about competence but about commoditisation. His phrase: your website will never be a special white glove snowflake on the Empire Flippers marketplace.
That is the honest shape of it. It is a machine. Machines are consistent and they are not personal.
Track record
Their public scoreboard is unusually transparent and updates live:
- $604,197,420 in lifetime sales volume
- 2,665 businesses sold
- 101 of those above $1 million, totalling $259.8 million
- 127 days average time to sale
- Around 650 NDAs signed weekly by buyers
Their best anecdote, and it is a real one: in 2021 a twenty year old pet care site sold for $1,029,303 in five hours and sixteen minutes from listing going live to the buyer placing a deposit. The buyer did not contact the team first. Asset transfer completed in 22 days.
They have made the Inc. 5000 repeatedly and were named in the Financial Times Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies 2021 list.
One thing to ignore on their site. Empire Flippers Capital, their investor fund arm, rebranded as WebStreet and separated from the company in April 2023. A legacy EF Capital page advertising a $25,000 minimum and 20% projected returns is still live on empireflippers.com and is roughly three years out of date. If you land on it, it is not a current Empire Flippers offering.
What I have seen of Empire Flippers first-hand
I should be clear about the limits of my own experience here, because it is different from my experience with Flippa.
I have been in the internet industry since the nineties and have bought and sold plenty of digital assets over that time, but I have never completed a sale through Empire Flippers. What I have done is watch their marketplace for years, browse listings, and go partway through their submission process with a business of my own.
What I can tell you is what the industry thinks of them, and what happened when I dealt with them directly.
The reputation is real, and it is specific
Empire Flippers is younger than Flippa, founded in 2011 against Flippa’s 2009, and it arrived with a narrower purpose: profitable online businesses rather than domains and odds and ends. That focus is why the reputation formed the way it did.
I know several operators who will not buy a digital business anywhere else. Not because Empire Flippers is cheap, because at 15% it plainly is not, but because the filtering means they can look at a listing and take the numbers seriously without spending two weeks proving the seller exists. When you buy often, that saved time is worth more than the fee.
That is the whole product, and it is worth understanding it in those terms. You are not paying 15% for a listing page. You are paying it so the person on the other side has already been made to prove who they are.
The submission process, and one thing that impressed me
I submitted a business to Empire Flippers while it was already listed with another marketplace, and I asked them directly whether that was a problem or a conflict of interest.
The answer I got back was to check whether my existing listing carried exclusivity terms before going any further, and that if I was under an exclusive arrangement I should resolve that first.
That is a small thing, but it is the correct answer, and it is not the answer a firm chasing inventory gives. They could have taken the submission and let me discover the conflict later. Reading my own agreement afterwards, they were right: I was under exclusivity, and proceeding would have created a genuine problem.
It is one interaction and I am not going to build a verdict on it. But it matched the reputation, which is the point of telling you about it.
The caveat that keeps this honest: I have not been through their vetting to completion, their migration, or a closed sale. Everything I have said about those in this review comes from their published material and from other people’s documented experiences, not from mine.
Pros and cons
- No listing fee and no retainer, so the risk sits entirely with them until you sell
- The 91% rejection rate is real and published with its underlying data, which is why buyers trust the marketplace
- Tiered commission means large deals are not punished the way a flat 15% would punish them
- A dedicated migrations department, which no other broker in this space staffs
- Live public scoreboard, quarterly reports and a genuinely useful podcast archive
- The $10,000 minimum commission makes anything under about $67,000 punishingly expensive, up to 25%
- They do not independently verify seller expenses, which is where profit is most easily overstated
- No third party escrow: they hold the money themselves
- No defined inspection period in the Terms of Use, only custom and practice
- Two month exclusivity locks you in before you know whether it is working
- Their own site contradicts itself on the minimum profit threshold and on who holds which job title
- Sellers report losing control of pricing and process once listed
Should you use Empire Flippers?
| If you are | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Selling an online business earning $6,000+ a month in profit | Yes. This is the sweet spot. The fee is real but the buyer pool and the migration team earn it. |
| Selling something worth under $70,000 | No. The $10,000 minimum commission eats you alive. Use Flippa or a direct sale. |
| Selling a SaaS business | Maybe. Acquire.com is purpose-built for SaaS and publishes its full fee table. |
| Selling a bricks and mortar business | No. Wrong marketplace entirely. You want BizBuySell or a local broker. |
| Buying | Yes, with your own diligence. Verify expenses yourself. They do not. |
| Not sure what you have | Get a valuation before you do anything else. |
Before you commit to 15%
A 15% fee on the wrong number is an expensive mistake
The commission only matters once you know what the business is actually worth. Work out the number first, then decide whether the marketplace, a broker or a direct sale gets you closest to it.
Work out what your business is worth
Free guide, no signup, with the multiples buyers are actually paying in 2026.
Questions worth asking before you list
- Exactly how long is the inspection period, and what revenue threshold does the business have to hit to pass it?
- What happens if the business underperforms during migration but the buyer has already released funds?
- Will you verify my expenses, or only my revenue? (The answer is revenue only.)
- What is my effective commission rate at my likely sale price, after the minimum?
- What happens at the end of the two month exclusivity if it has not sold?
Related reading
- Earned Exits review, the mid-market broker option for offline companies
- How much do business brokers charge, verified fees from eight companies including the minimums
- How to sell a business in 2026, the full process from preparation to closing
- Selling a business in Pennsylvania, if your business has a physical footprint too
- Selling a business in Texas, where state tax treatment changes the net proceeds
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Empire Flippers legit?
Yes. Empire Flippers has been operating since 2011, publishes a live scoreboard showing $604.2 million in lifetime sales across 2,665 businesses sold, holds a 4.2 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot from 114 reviews, and has appeared on the Inc. 5000 multiple times. The main caveats are commercial rather than legitimacy: a $10,000 minimum commission that makes small deals very expensive, no third-party escrow, and their own Terms of Use stating they do not independently verify seller expenses.
How much does Empire Flippers charge?
There is no listing fee. Commission is tiered and blended: 15% on the portion under $700,000, 8% on the portion between $700,000 and $5 million, and 2.5% above $5 million. Critically, there is a $10,000 minimum commission, so a $40,000 sale costs you 25% rather than 15%. The minimum stops mattering above about $66,667.
What are the requirements to sell on Empire Flippers?
Your business must earn at least $2,000 per month in net profit averaged over the last twelve months, have at least twelve months of revenue history, and have Google Analytics or Clicky tracking for at least three months before you apply. Ad-dependent sites must have been on the same domain for the full twelve months, and service businesses need at least 50% of revenue from multiple clients.
Why does Empire Flippers reject so many businesses?
They reject 91% of applicants, based on their own published analysis of 6,413 submissions. The single biggest reason is identity verification failure at 31%, followed by insufficient earnings or trading history at 25%. Sixty-four percent never get past their initial five-minute check. The rejection rate functions primarily as a fraud filter, which is what buyers are paying the commission for.
Does Empire Flippers verify the numbers on a listing?
Partially. They verify revenue, traffic and seller identity. Their Terms of Use state plainly that “Empire does not independently verify the expenses of the Business.” Since overstating net profit is most easily done by understating expenses, buyers should treat expense figures as unverified and do their own work on them.
Does Empire Flippers use escrow?
No third-party escrow. Buyers deposit the purchase price with Empire Flippers, who hold the funds as broker until the transfer completes. Their Terms of Use also state that all sales are final, with no refunds and no warranty as to the future performance of the business.
How long does it take to sell on Empire Flippers?
Their published average time to sale is 127 days. Vetting alone takes three to four weeks before your listing goes live, and migration after the sale runs two to eight weeks depending on the business model, with Amazon FBA at the longer end. Listings publish every Monday.
Is Empire Flippers better than Flippa?
They serve different sellers. Empire Flippers vets hard, charges 15% and suits profitable businesses above roughly $70,000 in value. Flippa is open, charges $29 to $199 to list below $100,000 plus a 10% success fee, accepts unprofitable and pre-revenue assets, and suits smaller or faster sales. Below about $70,000 the Empire Flippers minimum commission makes Flippa substantially cheaper.
Amine is an entrepreneur, investor and financial writer that covers the US economy, inflation, alternative investments, cryptocurrencies and more. He has been involved in the space for over a decade.
