Guide
How to check a website’s revenue before you buy it
Where a website’s revenue is recorded, how to read it, and what to look for once you can. One figure is from our sample of Flippa listings; the study has the rest of that sample.
Can you check a website’s revenue without the seller?
No. Revenue is recorded in the seller’s payment processor, and no public tool can read it. Traffic estimators guess visits from outside and do not see sales. To check revenue you need the seller to grant read-only access to the processor, or to share an export you can match against bank deposits.
3% of the 200 Flippa listings we sampled showed revenue Flippa itself had verified. The other 194 are asking you to take the screenshot on trust. (F(x) · 200 listings, July 2026)
Which records show a website’s real revenue?
The payment processor’s records: Stripe, Paddle or Shopify, depending on how the business takes payment. They show each charge, refund, discount and cancellation as it happened. A profit and loss statement or a screenshot is a summary the seller prepared from them, and a summary can leave things out.
F(x) can read Stripe, Paddle, Shopify, Google Analytics, GitHub and Supabase, read-only, once the seller grants each one. It requests no write, refund or admin scope, and the access is discarded when the scan ends.
What should you look for in subscription revenue?
Four things: subscribers on a discount that will end, the share of revenue from the largest customer, cancellations by the month customers signed up, and subscribers who pay but never use the product. Each one is revenue today that may not be revenue after you own it.
The F(x) checks that read a subscription business’s records:
- Discounts that expire after you have bought it
- Committed revenue against the headline figure
- Churn, by the month customers signed up
- How much of the revenue is one customer
- Subscribers who pay but never use it
How do you check the revenue of a Shopify store?
Read the store’s order history with read-only access. Compare the last three months against the months before them, then look at how much of the revenue came back as refunds, how much needed a discount, and how many customers bought more than once. A store with few repeat buyers has to pay to find every new sale.
The F(x) checks that read a store’s orders:
- Whether store revenue is growing or shrinking
- How much of the revenue comes back as refunds
- How much of the revenue needs a discount
- Whether the same customers buy twice
Buying a Shopify storecovers the rest of a store’s diligence.
What if the seller will not grant access?
Then the revenue is unverified, and the offer should say so. You can ask for an export of the processor’s records instead, match it against bank deposits, or hold part of the price in escrow until the revenue is confirmed after completion. A refusal is recorded in an F(x) report in the seller’s own words.
Sending the request costs nothing. Pricing says when the seller-data scan is charged.
Run the URL scan
Paste the address of the listing. 21 checks run from it, free, with no account.