Creative Online Marketing, Link Building and Ecommerce

I always wondered how people buy and sell businesses. I assumed that it must be through market-specific seminars/contacts or by using middle-men companies that facilitate such a deal. Going by the complexity of such deals, the third-party service I assumed (and later found out) is pretty expensive. It could be up to 10% of the company value. Not a paltry sum when you are trying to sell a business and make a profit from it. Often, 10% means sacrifising up to 2 more years worth of profits on a company that does nothing more that help you shake hands with your potential buyer.

I found this website today from an ad on Yahoo - http://www.bizbuysell.com and I was intrigued by it. It's like any other marketplace, what an obvious idea, damn I did not think of it first! If I were you, I would post my business on it just to see how many parties show interest. The site is pretty basic. There you go, a great idea and an opportunity for someone to come up with a much better site (perhaps even bidding and auction features instead of a direct price) specifically for business buy and sell. Even if you charged 2%, you would still be undercutting marketing companies that do this by a long shot. I am going to research some more sites like this and post it here. If you know of any, please enlighten me.