Seller-provided figures: what to ask for before you agree a price
Revenue, ad spend, profit and ROAS on a listing are seller-provided and not independently verified. What the platform suppresses when the maths does not hold, and what to request in the deal chat.
Every marketplace for online businesses has the same underlying problem: the seller owns the numbers. What differs is whether the marketplace admits it. Here, financial figures on a listing are seller-provided and not independently verified, and the listing itself says so.
What the platform does do
Rather than rubber-stamp the figures, we constrain what can be displayed as a derived claim. ROAS is calculated from revenue and spend rather than accepted as typed; it is withheld when spend is too small to divide by, when the result is implausibly high, or when a stored figure disagrees with the calculation. Payback is only shown when the result is a sensible number of months. Mixed currencies between the asking price and the metrics suppress both.
Listings whose numbers contradict each other — profit larger than lifetime revenue, revenue with no advertising spend behind it, an asking price or monthly profit far outside normal ranges, or the same financial fingerprint as another listing — are flagged for admin review rather than quietly published.
None of that makes a figure true. It only means the marketplace will not do arithmetic on your behalf that the inputs cannot support.
The four questions worth asking every time
- What window is this? Lifetime revenue next to a 30-day profit figure is two different stories — get both on the same dates.
- Show me the source live, not as an image. Screens share; screenshots do not prove much.
- What currency is each figure in? A price in euros against metrics in dollars changes the multiple.
- What happened in the worst month? A seller who can answer this is usually the one telling the truth about the good months.
Diligence you can do without the seller
Before you spend a call on it: read the storefront’s own policy pages, click Contact, Shipping and Returns, and check the footer business details are consistent. Google publishes the audit list it applies to misrepresentation and “website needs improvement”, and a store that fails it today is a store you will be fixing after handover.
Then compare the asking price against what similar stores have actually sold for here rather than against other asking prices. Asking prices are opinions; completed sales are evidence.
Sources
Questions
Why does the marketplace not just verify the revenue?
Because we would be verifying a screenshot. We check submitted fields for completeness and plausibility, we suppress derived figures we cannot stand behind, and we say plainly that the rest is seller-provided. Claiming an audit we do not perform would be the same overstatement we ask sellers not to make.
What should I ask for in the deal chat?
Live screen access to the accounts that produce the numbers, rather than exported images: the Merchant Center or Meta account, the ads account for the same date range as the claimed spend, and the store’s own order and payout reporting. Ask for the same window on every source, and check the currency matches the asking price.
A listing shows revenue but no ROAS. Is that a red flag?
It is a question, not a verdict. ROAS is only shown when there is enough advertising spend behind the revenue for the division to mean anything and the result lands in a believable range. Missing ROAS often means the spend was small, the currencies did not match, or the numbers disagreed with each other. Ask which.
Can I ask for the domain before I sign?
You can ask, and sellers frequently decline until a deal is progressing — the domain is the one field that makes the store identifiable and copyable. Scout-derived facts such as domain age and product count exist partly so you can sanity-check a store before its name is on the table.
Related guides
Browse stores for sale
Listings are public. You only need an account to enquire or to list.
Browse stores for sale