Business for Sale

Selling a small or medium business in South Africa usually meant going through a business broker. The broker held the relationship, decided how the business was described and where it was seen, and took a fee for it. Business for Sale started from a different idea: owners could advertise their own businesses, franchises and premises on one platform, and buyers could browse them directly.

Origin was involved from the very beginning, before there was a name on a screen. There was no brand, no site and no established way for a private owner to list a business, so we had to define what the service looked like as well as how it worked.

Most listing sites for businesses are built like property portals or classified ads. They ask a buyer to start from a long list and work down, and they treat a franchise, a going concern and a shop to rent as if they were the same kind of thing. The people using them come from very different places. A seller may never have advertised anything before. A buyer may be looking in one town for one kind of business, or may be weighing up a franchise in a different province.

The real problem was the starting point. If a person could not say quickly what they were looking for and where, the rest of the journey did not matter. A marketplace that asked owners to trust it with the sale of their business also had to look and feel like something they could trust.

We began with the brand, because trust came first. Origin created the logo, the identity and the visual language: a navy wordmark with a lime dot, a plain and friendly type treatment, and a colour pairing that separates action from information across the whole site.

Then we wireframed the journey with the client, on paper first, testing two options for login and registration and two states of the search results, with the map open and closed. That process settled the shape of the site before any visual design started.

Search by what people already know: location, sector and price were the questions buyers came with, so the homepage opened with a single search panel built around them, instead of a menu of categories to decode.

Businesses, franchises and premises as three clear tabs: each one is a different kind of purchase with its own logic, so the tabs separate them at the very first step and keep the counts visible.

One route for sellers: a Sell your business action sits beside the search panel on every screen size, so an owner never has to hunt for the way in.

Designed for phones from the start: filters, results, listings and the enquiry form were all designed at mobile size alongside the desktop screens, not shrunk down afterwards.

We designed and built the entire website, and it remains a fully responsive site today. Buyers can search by location, sector, price and by whether they want a business, a franchise or premises. Each listing carries the key figures near the top, with an enquiry form beside it, and owners can compare advertising packages and list their own business directly.

Around the listings sits the help that turns browsing into a decision: an advice section for buyers and sellers, a page for valuing a business, and a short contact page. The same components were designed for desktop and mobile, so a listing looks and works the same way whichever device someone picks it up on.

Business for Sale has gone from strength to strength since launch and continues to beat its own KPIs, year on year. It changed how businesses are found and sold in this market. Owners no longer need a broker to be seen, and buyers can start from where they want to be and what they want to buy.

For sellers, the platform turned advertising a business into something an owner could do themselves, at a price set out in plain packages. For buyers, it replaced a scatter of brokers' lists with one place to search by location, sector, franchise or premises. For the business itself, a clear structure and a strong brand gave it room to grow without the site becoming harder to use as listings and audiences increased.