Flippa Business Listings Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Flippa is the biggest marketplace for buying and selling online businesses, websites, and apps, and its own search filters are the only way to browse it at scale. This Actor drives those filters for you — pick 1-15 curated categories (Business, Internet, Ecommerce-heavy verticals, and more), a sale method (classified asking-price or live auction), and a page depth, and get back structured rows for every matching listing: asking/current price, average monthly profit, revenue and profit multiples, category, and the buy link. Built on curl-cffi with rotating browser impersonation and a US-pinned datacenter proxy so a run finishes clean even when Flippa's own front end changes shape underneath it.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox TLS handshakes on every fetch, good hygiene on any target.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 and network errors — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧩 Per-listing and per-page fault isolation — one malformed listing or an unparseable page skips just that item/fetch with a logged warning; it never sinks the whole run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable listing IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. A search that runs and matches nothing still succeeds — no data, no charge beyond the warm-up fee.

💡 Use cases

• Deal sourcing — feed acquisition criteria (category, sale method) and get every matching listing's deal economics in one export.
• Market research — track median multiples and asking prices across categories over time.
• Auction monitoring — watch bid_count and end_at across live auction listings to catch closing deals.
• Lead generation for brokers/advisors — surface sellers in a category who might want a valuation or brokerage service.
• Portfolio benchmarking — compare your own site's profit multiple against comparable live Flippa listings.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
categories	array	no	['Business', 'Internet']	0-15 Flippa top-level categories to search. Each category is a separate fetch (more categories means more distinct…
saleMethod	string	no	'both'	Filter by how the listing is sold: classified (fixed/negotiable asking price) or auction (live bidding). Choose both to…
status	string	no	'open'	Listing status filter. Flippa's search filter currently only returns real matches for 'open' (live, unsold) listings —…
maxPagesPerQuery	integer	no	2	Pages to fetch per category/sale-method combination. Flippa returns 25 listings per page, server-paginated via ?page=N.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True, 'apifyProxyGroups': ['BUYPROXIES94952']}	Apify Proxy spec — mandatory field. flippa.com/search showed no anti-bot challenge in recon (200 on first request,…

Example input

{
  "categories": [
    "Business",
    "Internet"
  ],
  "saleMethod": "both",
  "status": "open",
  "maxPagesPerQuery": 1,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "BUYPROXIES94952"
    ]
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
search_category	['string', 'null']	The category this row's fetch was filtered to, or null for an unfiltered search.
search_sale_method	string	The sale_method filter value used for this row's fetch (classified, auction, or both).
listing_id	integer	Flippa's internal numeric listing ID.
listing_url	string	Canonical listing page URL (https://flippa.com/
title	string	Listing headline, exactly as Flippa's search card renders it.
summary	string	Currently always "" — Flippa's redesigned search cards merged the headline and summary into one text block (see Limitations).
price	number	Asking price (classified) or current bid (auction) in the listing's currency. 0 for "Open to Offers" listings, which show no price.
price_text	string	Human-formatted price string as Flippa displays it (e.g. 'USD $2,473,879').
currency_label	['string', 'null']	Currency symbol/label prefix (e.g. 'USD $').
original_price	['number', 'null']	Pre-drop list price, read straight off the card's struck-through price when Flippa shows one.
profit_average	['number', 'null']	Monthly profit as Flippa's card displays it — rounded/condensed (e.g. '$28.3K'), not the exact figure.
revenue_average	['number', 'null']	Monthly revenue, same rounded/condensed caveat as profit_average.
multiple	['number', 'null']	Asking-price-to-profit multiple.
revenue_multiple	['number', 'null']	Currently always null — no longer shown on Flippa's search cards (see Limitations).
category	['string', 'null']	Flippa's display category (e.g. 'Business').
property_type	['string', 'null']	Listing property type (e.g. 'Ecommerce', 'SaaS', 'Digital Agency').
monetization	['string', 'null']	Currently always null — no longer shown on Flippa's search cards (see Limitations).
sale_method	string	'classified' (asking price / open to offers) or 'auction' (live bidding).
sale_method_title	['string', 'null']	Human label for the sale method, verbatim from the card (e.g. 'Asking price', 'Open to Offers', 'Auction').
status	string	Listing status (e.g. 'open').
bid_count	['integer', 'null']	Number of bids placed, for auction listings. 0 for a fresh auction with no bids yet.
established_at	['integer', 'null']	Site/business age in years.
end_at	['string', 'null']	Currently always null — auction cards only show a relative countdown ('5 days left'), not an absolute timestamp (see Limitations).
country_name	['string', 'null']	Seller's reported state/country.
confidential	boolean	Currently always false — no longer detectable from the search-results card (see Limitations).
verified_traffic	boolean	Inferred from the card's integration badges (true if a traffic-analytics tool like Google Analytics is connected) — an approximation, not a Flippa-asserted flag (see Limitations).
verified_revenue	boolean	Inferred the same way as verified_traffic, from payment/accounting/storefront/ad-revenue integration badges.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp when this row's page was fetched.

Example output

{
  "search_category": "Business",
  "search_sale_method": "both",
  "listing_id": 13846152,
  "listing_url": "https://flippa.com/13846152-automated-ai-ceo-running-a-profitable-agency-with-recurring-clients-proven-lead-generation-systems-a-trained-team-and-scalable-fulfillment-operations-in-the",
  "title": "Automated AI CEO running a profitable agency with recurring clients, proven lead generation systems, a trained team, and scalable fulfillment operations in the",
  "summary": "",
  "price": 2473879.0,
  "price_text": "USD $2,473,879",
  "currency_label": "USD $",
  "original_price": null,
  "profit_average": 102000.0,
  "revenue_average": 206000.0,
  "multiple": 2.0,
  "revenue_multiple": null,
  "category": "Business",
  "property_type": "Digital Agency",
  "monetization": null,
  "sale_method": "classified",
  "sale_method_title": "Asking price",
  "status": "open",
  "bid_count": null,
  "established_at": 3,
  "end_at": null,
  "country_name": "NV, United States",
  "confidential": false,
  "verified_traffic": false,
  "verified_revenue": false,
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-01T07:33:14.955905+00:00"
}

This row was captured live 2026-10-01 and cross-checked field-by-field against flippa.com/13846152-... — price, property type, and seller location all match.

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.2	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.006	Per unique dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $6.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

v0.1 filters by Flippa's 15 top-level categories, sale method, and status=open only — narrower facets (price range, monthly profit range, verified-traffic-only, TLD, country) aren't exposed yet. Flippa's own search filter didn't return real data for any status besides 'open' in recon testing. Confidential listings show only the fields Flippa itself exposes pre-NDA (no seller identity or direct URL beyond the search-result page).

Flippa rebuilt its search-results page (confirmed 2026-10-01) from a React app onto a server-rendered page, which removed a few fields this Actor used to read from Flippa's own API response. We read every field we honestly can from the new page and null out the rest rather than guess:

• summary is currently always empty — the redesigned card only renders one description block, which we map to title.
• monetization and revenue_multiple are currently always null — Flippa no longer shows either on the search card itself (only, possibly, on the full listing page).
• end_at is currently always null — auction cards show a relative countdown ("5 days left"), not an absolute close time.
• confidential is currently always false — the search card no longer carries a pre-NDA indicator.
• verified_traffic / verified_revenue are inferred from which integrations (Google Analytics, Stripe, Shopify, etc.) a listing shows as connected, not an explicit flag from Flippa — treat them as a reasonable signal, not a guarantee.
• profit_average / revenue_average reflect Flippa's own rounded, condensed on-card figures (e.g. "$28.3K"), not exact cents-level numbers.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a Flippa account?

No. This Actor scrapes Flippa's public /search results page — no login required.

What does maxPagesPerQuery control?

Flippa serves 25 listings per page via ?page=N. This caps how many pages are fetched per category/sale-method combination; higher values mean more listings and more result-row charges.

Why is status fixed to 'open'?

Flippa's own search filter only returned real matches for status=open in testing; other status values returned an empty result set (a Flippa quirk, not an Actor limitation).

Do I need a residential proxy?

No. Recon found no anti-bot challenge on flippa.com/search — the default US-pinned datacenter proxy is sufficient.

What happens if a category matches nothing?

The run succeeds with zero rows for that category and reports what was searched — a real zero-match result is not treated as a failure.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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