Bonza Business Brokers Review
There are a growing number of brokers and marketplaces to help Aussies sell their business. Bonza is a full service broker so they help with everything from valuing your business, to advertising it and negotiating with buyers. Aussie Acquire tracks in real time each business that hits the Bonza marketplace. As one of the brokers with the largest number of listings for eCommerce businesses in Australia. This review will break down some of the pros and cons of using Bonza Business Brokers.
1) The basics of Bonza Brokers
If you don't know how a traditional business broker works, check out my guide on choosing to list yourself vs with a broker for the differences.
Similar to how a Real Estate agent, will sell your house.
A traditional broker is typically one person that takes you through from valuing your business to advertising and selling your business.
Instead Bonza has specialists for each stage of the selling process.
This helps streamline the process, potentially making it better value for smaller business sales.
Bonza sells both traditional 'bricks and mortar' businesses as well as online businesses.
So whilst they sell lots of eCommerce stores they are not online only specialists.
2) How big are Bonza Business Brokers?
Between January and July 2022, Bonza had the following number of online businesses listed:
- 36 Online Businesses Listed
- $244k Average Listed Sale Price
- $25k Smallest Business listed
- $950k Largest Business listed
Don't forget they had more listings but for the purposes of this article I am only including the online businesses.
3) What are Bonza business broker fees?
The listing fee for all businesses is $3,990 +GST.
This fee can be split up into monthly payments if you prefer.
This fee covers all the marketing and representation costs of listing your business.
When you sell there is a commission based on the sale price.
What is their commission?
- $3,000 +GST if your business sells for under $75k
- Or 4% +GST of sale price for businesses above $75k.
Find out in the next section, everything that a Bonza broker does to sell your business.
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4) How do Bonza sell your business?
These are the basic steps that you will take to list your business with Bonza brokers.
1) First you will jump on a call to discuss your business and valuation. You can do that by sending an enquiry here.
2) Then they copywriters will write the advertisement for your business. Once approved this will get sent out to all the listing platforms.
3) Marketing is done by advertising in the following places:
- Seek Business ($660 to list as an owner till sold)
- Commercial Real Estate
- Any Business ($495 for 6 month listing as owner)
- Business for Sale ($429 for basic 6 month listing as owner)
- Australia Businesses for Sale ($349 for 6 month listing as owner)
- Bsale ($385 for 6 month listing as owner)
- Business and Franchise Sales (No fee)
- Businesses View (Only brokers can list)
- Bonza Website (they get an average of 200 new buyers contacting them each week)
- Bonza Social Media channels
- Facebook 508 followers
- Instagram 284 followers
4) They build a custom Business Profile document to share with potential buyers. This helps explain your business and reduce the number of questions for you from buyers.
5) Buyer enquiries from email, calls or SMS are handled by the broker team. So you can focus on the projects you want to focus on.
6) They follow up with buyers every 2-3 days to filter out buyers where it is not a match and help answer questions for those that are a match.
7) They help negotiate the deal with the buyer and once an agreement is reached they provide the Business for Sale contract for free.
Bonza continue this 7 step process until your business sells.
They also offer a 90 day Buyer Guarantee so they guarantee to get you a written offer for your business in the first 90 days.
If not they offer to review your listing and pricing, upgrade your advert and do a social media and email campaign with existing buyers in their pool.
5) How to buy on Bonza?
To unlock all the listing details, you will need to send an enquiry and complete their Confidentiality Agreement (CA).
Most broker websites are pretty old fashioned and their search functions are fairly limited.
However Bonza has a nice fresh clean design.
They don't have a specific filter for online or eCommerce businesses on their website.
But you can find all their current live online business listings that Bonza has on Aussie Acquire here:
6) What are the major benefits of using a Bonza Broker?
Here are some of the reasons why using Bonza might make sense for your business:
- High number of listings - Bonza are one of the brokers that have the most online business listings in Australia.
- Experience - Just like in Real Estate having someone to value, negotiate and help with the paperwork can free up a lot of your own time.
- Best price for your business - Any broker should be looking to help you get the most you can for your business. If they can sell for more than the listing cost and commission then you have made money.
- Exposure - Your business can be listed on 8 of the popular business for sale websites. As a private seller this can cost $2-3k every 6 months.
- Buying vetted - Buying from Bonza you know that there has been some vetting to get the business listed and that the owner is reasonable with their asking price.
Bonza also offer a free business valuation so you can get a rough idea of what your business might be worth.
If you use this tool, then Bonza may call and email you to ask if you are interested in selling your business.
7) Any major drawbacks to using Bonza?
Here are some of the reasons why using Bonza might not make sense for your business:
- Fee - Although you can pay the fee in instalments, this up front fee will put some sellers off.
- Online specialists - Whilst they list a lot of eCommerce businesses, they are not online only specialists as they sell around 50% online and 50% offline businesses.
- Business size - If your business is worth more than 7 figures then you may be better finding a broker with more experience in this sale range.
- Listings don't include Profit figures - This is fairly standard not to include amongst brokers but it would be nice to include the revenue or profit number to give more context to the asking price.
- Multiples - By not listing profit figures this makes it hard to know if the multiples Bonza is listing are high or low compared to the industry average.
- Post Sale Support - This is also not mentioned in the listing so it is worth checking what is included here once you go deeper into the business.
- Bonza does not provide Due Diligence for the buyer, you can order an impartial Due Diligence report from Aussie Acquire here.
8) Reviews of Bonza Brokers?
As with anything online, you want to research and make the best choice.
Bonza are a legitimate broker so you can be safe knowing that they are not an online scam.
I have collected all the other independent reviews that I can find here:
On Google, Bonza has three different listings for each State; Victoria, Queensland and NSW.
Bonsa Victoria has 29 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 stars.
Bonza NSW has 34 total reviews with an average 4.9 star rating.
Bonza QLD has 59 reviews with a 4.8 star rating.
The few negative reviews seem to focus on having to pay the commission fees after the sale of the business.
So make sure you calculate what the commission fees could be on the sale and are okay with that before committing to sell.
If you have used Bonza to sell your online business and want to provide feedback for them, feel free to let me know me here.
8) Summary
After looking at their listings, talking to Bonza, researching their business and looking at reviews.
Some of the common themes in their Google reviews was that they were professional, responsive and patient with guiding through the sale process.
This makes them perfect if it is your first time selling your business.
And especially if your business is at the lower end of the market with a valuation under $150k.
Overall Bonza are a legitimate broker in the Aussie eCommerce space and although they do not specialise in online businesses.
They list a lot of online businesses so should be able to provide accurate valuations and successful sales.
Got a question for Bonza Business Brokers?
Message the team at Bonza and they can help answer any questions.
Thank you for getting in touch!