Buying a Turnkey Website - What are the Pros and Cons?

There are many ways to get into e-commerce. The most traditional way is to find a niche, have a designer build the site or build it yourself through a popular platform, and start selling. This demands a lot of time and effort, and at the end of the day, there’s no telling if you’re going to be able to compete or not.

On the other hand, you have the option of buying a website that’s already getting some traffic and sales, and take it from there. Though it might seem like a foolproof option, buying readymade websites does come with some caveats as well. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of buying a turnkey website.

Pro - Less Startup Work

Building a website is often the toughest part of starting a business. If you decide to build it yourself and have no experience, then you might not get the website you wanted. If you decide to hire someone, then you might end up paying a lot to get a professional-looking website.

With a readymade website, everything’s already done for you. You can check out an exchange marketplace and look for the exact type of business/website you were looking for. Certain sites allow you to browse businesses based on revenue, inventory, and profit per month, and once the site is yours, you can have it up and running the very same day. It’s hard to beat this kind of convenience.

Con - Getting Traffic Can be a Challenge

One of the things with turnkey websites is that you have no idea how they were getting their traffic. While seeing some profit is nice, if you don’t know which marketing methods they were using and how to use them, then nothing guarantees that you’ll be able to replicate their results.

In this case, you can always ask the seller what’s their main source of traffic and marketing method, but nothing says they’ll be honest. If they have a solid content marketing strategy, and you know nothing about content, then you may have a hard time getting the same profits as they did.

Pro - Taking Advantage of Previous Marketing Work

You should also know that their previous marketing efforts might benefit you as well. If they managed to rank the website for some major keywords, for instance, this could be invaluable. It can take a lot of time to get traction from SEO, and getting a website that is already ranking will save you a lot of time and money.

Con - Duplicate Content Issues

In some cases, people will sell the same website multiple times or use the same content. In this case, you might be dealing with duplicate content issues, which are not very good for SEO. This means that you may have to rewrite the content on all the pages, which could take you a lot of time and take away from the site’s true value.

Readymade turnkey websites do have their benefits, but some disadvantages as well. They’re not always easy to manage, but they can allow you to save if you don’t want to spend hundreds on design and have a proven business you can start without too much work.