You have decided to sell your Shopify store. From here the process is less mysterious than it looks: pick a venue, price the business, build a listing that survives a buyer's questions, negotiate, close through escrow, hand over the keys, and get paid. This guide walks that path in order, including what each venue actually costs, so you know what a sale involves before you commit to one.
Choose where you're selling before you choose a price
Where you sell decides almost everything downstream: who sees your listing, how much verification happens before an offer lands, and how much of your own time the deal eats.
Open marketplaces are the widest net. Anyone can list, anyone can browse, and volume is high. That reach comes with noise: unverified numbers sit next to real ones, and buyers know it, so they discount everything until proven otherwise.
Curated marketplaces and brokers vet listings before they go live and often run outreach to buyers directly. You trade a fee, and sometimes a slower start, for a buyer pool that has already been screened once.
A broker working your deal specifically negotiates and manages diligence for you, for a commission on the close. Worth it if your time is the scarcer resource. Not worth it if your store is small enough that the commission eats the upside.
Kairos sits closer to the curated end: every listing's revenue is verified from real order data before it goes live, not from a seller's screenshot, and listing itself is free. The how it works page covers the full flow from listing to close. If you're already comparing venues, the Flippa alternatives breakdown is worth reading before you pick one.
None of these venues are mutually exclusive in principle, but running one process well beats running three badly. Pick one, understand its buyer pool, and commit.
Price it before anyone else does
Get your number before a venue or a buyer gets to set it for you. The standard method is SDE (seller discretionary earnings, meaning net profit plus your own salary and any personal costs run through the business) times a multiple. For verified stores, that multiple runs roughly 2.2x to 3.2x annual SDE, with strong brands pushing toward 4.5x. Revenue alone is not the number; a store with thin margins and big revenue is worth less than a smaller store with real profit.
The full method, including how growth, traffic mix, and store age move your multiple, is in how to value a Shopify store. If you'd rather type your numbers into something than do the math by hand, the valuation calculator runs the same method on six inputs.
Price too high and your listing sits, aging in front of the exact buyers who would otherwise take it seriously. Price too low and you have given away money you did not need to. A defensible number, one you can walk a stranger's accountant through, beats an optimistic one every time.
Build a listing that survives a buyer's questions
A listing does two jobs: it gets attention, and it holds up once attention arrives. Most sellers only build for the first job.
Public listings should show enough to be credible without handing over the store: a verified revenue range, the niche, the age of the business, and the broad shape of the traffic. What they should not show is your full profit and loss, your order-level data, or your supplier list. Those open up behind a signed NDA, once a buyer has shown they are serious enough to be worth the exposure.
This is not paranoia, it is standard practice, and it protects you either way. A buyer who will not sign an NDA was never going to close. A buyer who does sign gets real numbers, reconciled against actual order data rather than a claim, which is exactly what makes the eventual offer defensible instead of negotiable down to nothing.
Fielding offers and signing the LOI
Offers arrive with three variables worth comparing side by side: price, structure, and timeline. An all-cash offer at a lower number can beat a higher offer paid out over eighteen months, depending on how much you trust the buyer to actually make those payments. A buyer who wants sixty days of diligence is a different risk than one ready to move in two weeks.
Once you pick an offer, both sides sign a letter of intent. The LOI is not the sale, but it is the point where the terms stop moving: price, structure, what is included, and a rough timeline all get written down before deeper diligence begins. Treat verbal agreements before the LOI as soft and everything after it as the real negotiation.
What it actually costs to sell, venue by venue
Fees are where venues diverge the most, and they are worth comparing before you list anywhere.
Flippa charges listing packages starting at 29 dollars, plus a 10 percent success fee on the sale.
Empire Flippers has no listing fee. Instead it takes a flat 10,000 dollar commission on sales up to roughly 66,700 dollars, then a tiered percentage above that: 15 percent up to 700,000, 8 percent above 700,000, and 2.5 percent past 5 million.
Motion Invest lists for free and charges a success fee that slides with size, from 20 percent on sales under 20,000 dollars down to 5 percent on sales over 500,000.
Acquire.com charges a monthly listing fee of 25 to 100 dollars, plus a 6 to 8 percent closing fee when the deal completes.
Kairos lists for free, with a success fee charged only when the deal actually closes. No monthly fee for sitting on the market, no charge for a listing that never sells.
Read every fee schedule as "what does this cost if my deal actually closes," not just the headline listing price. A free listing with a high success fee can cost more on a large deal than a paid listing with a lower one. Do the arithmetic on your own expected sale price before you pick a venue on fees alone.
Escrow, transfer, and the handover
Once the LOI is signed and diligence clears, funds move into escrow rather than straight to you. This protects both sides: the buyer knows the money is committed and the seller knows it is real, not a promise that evaporates mid-transfer.
Transfer itself covers more than the Shopify store. A full handover typically moves: the store and its theme, the domain, ad accounts, the email list and any customer data covered by the sale, and introductions to key suppliers. Missing pieces here are the single most common source of post-sale disputes, so agree on the full list in writing before escrow funds, not after.
Funds release from escrow against milestones, usually tied to confirmed transfer of each asset and a working handover, rather than all at once on signature. Two to eight weeks from accepted offer to completed handover is typical, depending on how many accounts need moving and how responsive both sides are.
Training the buyer and getting paid
Most deals include a transition period where you stay reachable, walk the buyer through daily operations, and answer the questions that only show up once someone else is actually running the store. This is not generosity, it is part of what you sold: a business a new owner can operate, not just a login.
Payout lands once handover is confirmed complete and any agreed transition period has run its course. This is the step escrow exists to protect: the buyer cannot walk away holding both the store and the money, and you cannot hand over the store and be left chasing payment.
Where sales stall or fall apart
Most failed sales fail for the same handful of reasons. Financials the seller cannot back up with real data, and that fall apart the moment a buyer asks for order-level detail. Missing pieces in the asset list, discovered during transfer instead of before it. A seller who disappears during the training period, leaving a buyer stuck with a business they do not know how to run. And unrealistic pricing that never attracts a serious offer in the first place, because the number was picked to feel good rather than to hold up.
Every one of these is avoidable with preparation before you list, not negotiation after someone makes an offer.
Ready to sell
Selling a Shopify store is a process with a known shape: venue, price, listing, offer, escrow, transfer, payout. The sellers who close well are the ones who treat each stage as real work rather than a formality on the way to the number they want.
Selling on Kairos starts with verifying your revenue against your real Shopify order data, free, before any buyer sees a number. Kairos is pre-launch, and the waitlist gets first access when listings open.