What’s the worth of your online business in 2025?

The online business marketplace is simple.

You’re either a buyer looking for an already established business to buy—or a seller willing to part with one. And you negotiate until signing on the dotted line.

But to exit the negotiation room satisfied, you’ll have to do your due diligence. Which can be a bit of a daunting task if you don’t have data you can reference.

For that reason, we’ve kindly asked Empire Flippers—an online business marketplace—if they can provide anonymized data to look into.

And do a report on how much an online business is actually worth.

Well, it’s here. Time to check the numbers… 

What’s the average profit multiple of your online business?

To sell a business, you have to determine what it’s worth.

There are a lot of factors determining one’s value, but let’s go with the simplest. 

If you have an online business that’s seeing solid revenue and turning a profit, the first thing you want to see is—how much that business is worth, of course.

We’ve used the data provided by Empire Flippers to calculate the yearly profit multiple of all online businesses sold on their website, and here’s how it looked like:

Say we take the 2023 average. And your business saw a yearly profit of $100k—the EF data says you could’ve asked around $433k for the business.

At least that’s how much businesses went for on average.

A massive dip happened in 2023. Post-covid, asset bubble popping, high interest rates, and acquisition funds unable to give investors the return promised—leading to bankrupcy. All this created a buyer vacuum for 7-figure businesses. In 2024, those buyers started returning.

Greg Elfrink, CMO of Empire Flippers

You can also see that the average sales price went up in 2021—when a lot of online businesses saw peak revenue, combined with the remote-friendly context of the pandemic.

The trend went down again during 2022—and then back to 2023. 

We can’t see this year’s data, but going by the global trend, you shouldn’t expect a sellers’ market when it comes to online businesses—nor higher multiples.

Now let’s check revenue multiple:

This follows a similar trend. Of course, it also paints a bit of a clearer picture—on average, you can sell for a little above what you earned in total. 

What do you say? A good deal or a hard pass?

Well, according to experts revenue is often considered a vanity metric in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) game and a business is going to be valued mostly on profit.

But it’s a good data for comparison.

What online industry has the highest profit multiple?

Truth bomb: Building a proper e-commerce business to sell is tough. 

Something that requires lower costs of goods or services—like a blog or an Amazon FBA—can be more difficult to make profitable at first, but provide more gains.

Or at least, that was the case from 2019-2022. According to Greg Elfring, CMO of Empire Flippers—these were “simpler businesses” at the time but depend a lot on one or many tech giants—Google SEO for affiliates, or Amazon for FBA where you don’t get full customer data.

And here’s how it looked like over the years:

If you just want to see the full picture: We’ve plucked some of the most relevant industries for marketers from the data and laid them side by side as well:

As you can see, profit multiples can vary—from around 2x to 7x. 

And the image says it all. Subscription box businesses, which are technically e-commerce but with more scalability and predictable profits—can be quite profitable if developed well.

We sold a DTC ecommerce brand for slightly under $13m at the start of the year. Buyers are now looking to own full customer lifecycle. The more you own the customer journey—the more resilience you have. Hence why there is a growing hunger for DTC brands and marketing agencies now. 

Greg Elfrink, CMO of Empire Flippers

On the other hand, developing digital products might be the least profitable, especially due to ongoing development and maintenance costs.

Surprising? Or not really? Here’s what Empire Flippers had to say:

• Dropshipping is one of the hardest business models to sell as it doesn’t provide a lot of exclusivity in terms of product, brand, suppliers, etc.
• Subscription boxes often don’t work as owners try to turn it into a MRR revenue stream, instead of scaling it “normally.”
• Digital products like courses or info products often have lower value because they’re tied to the owner’s personal brand, making them harder to sell since the new owner can’t easily step into that role. They’re still sellable, just more challenging.
• Digital tends to have the best margins, but it also doesn’t often scale as good as say SaaS or DTC e-commerce can.

What are the gross profit margins by industry

With that out of the way, let’s see which monetization types bring the biggest returns.

For example, e-commerce has one of the lowest margins out of the industries we selected.

That’s due to a number of costs included in running such a business—from production to inventory management, and shipping. 

While the margins are lower, DTC e-commerce also has the large room in terms of scaling up. B2C markets are massive, so despite lower margin potential there’s a much higher overall profit potential. Mostly due to ability to scale to massive groups of people that a B2B SaaS for example wouldn’t have a chance to do.

Greg Elfrink, CMO of Empire Flippers

On the other hand, websites that monetize via Display Ads can have a high gross margin since you could devote your entire day to running it, writing content, promoting it, and similar.

Now let’s jump to the most interesting part…

Where does your business stand in terms of profits? 

…on average, of course.

Here’s a chart that can tell an interesting story:

We see one interesting trend here. Revenue and expenses go unusually high during the last month of the year.

The two main seasons for this are because most exiting and buying happens in Q3—so the buyer can benefit from the Q4 rush. Or Q1 where the sellers can benefit from higher valuations thanks to said rush.

If you want to buy a business, for instance—try to follow that revenue pattern over the years when determining the realistic average monthly revenue. 

Furthermore, average expenses of running a business were the highest ever this year:

Do you see what we see? The blue bar indicating revenue went steadily up, but the dark green bar showing profit barely moved in half a decade. 

Which means that prices went up. Expenses went up. And profits stayed nearly the same. 

Verdict: The state of all online businesses correlates the state we found with online sales in general. And possibly the economy. 

Selling your business today would on average bring you the same amount as five years ago. However, adjusted for inflation, you are actually earning less. Uh-oh.

Industries that got tougher to scale and sell

But according to this data, businesses in a few industries found it harder to grow and sell at their peak. 

One of them is building and selling apps:

Since owner salaries aren’t included—and looking at the expenses bar—we can assume that most of the apps sold on this particular marketplace are solo-built.

In 2019, building an app on your own—and scaling it, promoting it, and selling it—seems to be quite lucrative. 

But you can see how the profits of apps sold in this marketplace slowly tanked. Sales included.

Apps are ultra competitive. They also suffer from a similar issue as affiliates and FBA—where they are largely beholden to the Apple and Android marketplaces. Historically, these have not always been friendly to app developers.

Greg Elfrink, CMO of Empire Flippers

We’re showing you this because we’re coming to the juicy part. If you tap the e-commerce button above, this is what you’d get:

It’s now common knowledge that 2019 and 2020 were great years for online businesses. But especially e-commerce.

On the marketplace, the average store revenue that was sold in 2020 was $61k. In 2023, it was only $27.5k. Ouch.

Keep in mind: This doesn’t mean that all online stores earn less nowadays—even if many do. But these are earnings of online stores that were sold on Empire Flippers—which tells us that it was much easier to sell a high-revenue store in 2019 and 2020 than now. 

It is definitely harder to sell today than in 2019 even if valuations are better—and this is largely due to how expensive capital has gotten. Rising interest rates, less risk-taking investors, and many investors seeking safer more reliable yield than acquiring a business.

Greg Elfrink, CMO of Empire Flippers

If you have a solid e-commerce business for sale, consider that it’s a buyers’ market out there. And probably will remain a buyer’s market for quite some time. So evaluate whether it’s worth it to grow it more, or possibly sell below price.

If you’re a buyer… Well, we don’t have any other advice, but we can suggest checking the market for some interesting deals.

The impact traffic can have on your business’ value

Finally, we had the opportunity to look at one interesting piece of data—traffic.

And while traffic isn’t the deciding factor when it comes to business value, you can definitely make a correlation between the amount of website visitors and the profit of your business.

Here’s what the data says: 

Amazon’s fulfilment services are looking like worthwhile traffic destinations. Which, in truth, might be skewed by available data—and the fact users land on Amazon with shopping intent only. Unlike other businesses that provide informational content, for instance.

The same goes for service businesses, which are often high-ticket. 

On the other hand, businesses that rely on tons of traffic to succeed—such as those monetized by Display Ads, affiliates, and digital products, naturally cost less per unique user. 

So think that, if you have a website you monetize with ads only, you’ll need to drive 100k unique users on average per month to sell it for $4000. 

Now if you want to see the cost of your business compared to all website visits—and not just unique, the situation is similar:

But this time you’d need 200k traffic on your website to sell it for $4000.

Keep in mind: These are the average prices per traffic of businesses sold on Empire Flippers’ marketplace—so the prices may vary depending on the traffic quality. 

Still, it’s good to have some kind of a reference point.

How much is your business worth on average—per industry?

It’s time to crank the most important numbers.

If you’re looking to sell or buy a business, these are how they’re usually valued at Empire Flippers—depending on the industry.

Subscription Box businesses sell for over $6M on average. 

But they don’t sell a lot. Since 2019 to this year, only two subscription box businesses have sold on Empire Flippers.

Is the price justified? Maybe. A predictable monthly revenue and higher price gives it a high profit multiple (7x in this marketplace’s case), which helps boost its value.

Amazon’s FBM ($862K) and FBA ($605K) are in second and third places, followed by service ($357K) and e-commerce businesseses ($354K) wrapping up the top five.

SaaS businesses ($294K) are a bit off the $300K threshold, with other industries seeing businesses going for south of $200K, mostly.

The most interesting takeaway: Businesses hardly sell for more than $1M on marketplaces, unless we’re talking about unicorns. 

Therefore, if you grew and scaled a business, you need to put everything on paper—calculate margins and multiples, and compare it to averages from this section. 

You’ll probably have a decent picture of how much you can price it and can temper your expectations. 

It is a great time for buyers due to inflation rising, overall defeatism, and similar—and you can often get better deals today than back in 2019. A buyer might pay more for a deal today compared to five years ago, but the terms of that deal might be much better in what the seller is willing to finance to the buyer.

Greg Elfrink, CMO of Empire Flippers

Build, earn… sell? 

Take note: The numbers in this article are from one particular online business marketplace. 

While that’s enough to help you not undervalue or overvalue your enterprise, the numbers are still not definitive. 

Understanding market trends, industry averages, and key valuation metrics can be essential. And while some industries can command higher prices, overall, it’s still a buyers’ market.

Finally, you can use this report as a reference point, but do more research before you make the final decision. And, of course—happy selling!

Sources:

• Empire Flippers