Quirky Small Biz E-tailers Seek Buyers

N E W   Y O R K, May 14 -- "I bought this domain name with a vision," says Inder Sharma, proprietor of hotel.com, "because I am a visionary." So why is he selling his business? And is it worth the $6 million asking price?

Sharma, based in Southern California, says he needs to sell hotel.com to pay for a lawsuit. But prospective buyers have offered no more than $2.5 million in recent weeks, he says. And Sharma feels that's not good enough.

"I can build this into a $100 million company," asserts Sharma, who says he bought the domain name for $10,000 in 1996 with money he took out of his daughter's savings account. He believes the site, which offers discounted room reservations, can become "the Yahoo! of the hotel industry."

But Sharma has yet to see a payoff. And he is just one of many small e-business owners, looking to sell for personal or financial reasons, who have placed a listing on the San Francisco-based site webmergers.com, where prospective buyers can find businesses like hammocks.com (asking price: $2.25 million), personalbestnutrition.com (about $1.5 million), or touchheaven.com, an online telescope dealer offered for a mere $12,900.

But a year after the Web bubble began to burst, those looking to sell are finding it much harder to cash in than it would have been in 1999 or even the spring of 2000.

"There is a massive lack of will on the part of buyers," says Tim Miller, head of webmergers.com, who keeps track of transactions in the Internet sector in addition to providing a listings service. "There is a huge amount of indecision and delaying and canceling of deals."

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According to Miller, a total of $600 million was paid for Internet companies in January of this year — which sounds like a lot, but pales in comparsion to the $3.7 billion shelled out in January 2000.

Foot Soldiers of the Internet Revolution

Owners of online small businesses are the foot soldiers of the would-be Internet revolution, toiling away on sites with profiles much lower than big-money ventures such as amazon.com or the now-defunct eToys.