Where Should You Sell Your Own Car
If you’re reading this, you likely already understand the cash you would lose by trading in your car. However, the last thing you want to do now is burn a large amount of time and money selling your car. You’ll not only pay fees to list your car on many classifieds services and online auction sites, but it will take time to put your ads together properly. Valuable time may be wasted by people who make appointments and never show up. You will also most likely have to show your car to at least a few prospective buyers (aka leads) before you find a buyer.
There are a number of ways to advertise your car and they vary in the amount of time you’ll take to list and sell. The amount of effort expended is usually proportional to the effectiveness of the means. For example, probably the cheapest and easiest thing to go is to put a “For Sale” sign in your car window and drive around for weeks hoping that the right buyer sees it.
Next is putting an ad in the local newspaper. It isn’t hard to think of a three-line text ad and hope the phone rings… but you may find this method expensive and increasingly ineffective as more and more shoppers turn to other mediums to shop.
Online advertising is quickly becoming the preferred method for finding a car to buy. Recent studies show that for the first time more than half of all cars were bought as a result of an online search. For buyers, online ads or auctions offer a number of clear advantages over print. We’ll discuss how to turn these to your advantage later:
• Timeliness
So, it appears that an online ad is the place to be, but now which web site do I use? Let’s examine the different types of sites.
Online Classifieds – These are sites where you can present information about your vehicle with the intent of driving a lead to you by phone or email. These tend to lean toward geographical listings (“enter your zip code to find cars near you”) because buyers and sellers are intending to meet each other in person. There are number of these sites out there, including car club sites for brand-specific interest groups. Some are free like Craigslist and Google Base and others charge a listing fee like Cars.com and Autotrader.com .
Online Marketplaces – Sites where negotiations or even the entire transaction can be consummated online. The biggest and most widely known is eBay Motors, the automotive section of eBay. There are a few others but they tend to be focused primarily on classic cars (gofastauctions, for example). eBay Motors listings can also function as a classified ad. In addition to the well-known online auction, they allow sellers of vehicles to list cars with a fixed price and offer a classifieds format with a “best offer” price negotiation tool. A lot of shoppers also look for cars on eBay but contact sellers by email or phone because they aren’t quite comfortable with the idea of an unseen car purchase.
So, where should you list? My suggestion is to list in as many of these places as you can. But understand a few points. First, in most cases it will take time to create a compelling listing on each site unless you use a service like Mota’s which takes care of this for you. Second, with the exception of Craigslist.org most of the classifieds sites are focused primarily on car dealers. Dealers typically send hundreds of listings at a time and they often get premium placement in search results on top of listings by individuals. Your experience may vary but take a look at search results for cars like yours and see how many there are and how many are from dealers.
Certainly put that for sale sign in the window while you are at it as well because lightning may strike but you want to use the Internet to maximize your exposure and speed up your time to sell. Some sites have millions of visitors every month (eBay Motors claims over 12.5 million unique visitors to the Motors category every month… making it the largest-trafficked automotive site out there). Some other sites have many more listings than they have visitors.
Craigslist is an interesting site. It’s both free and, in many parts of the country, gets tremendous traffic. The site is organized geographically (a site for each city or region, for example) but many sellers report calls from many states away. I even sold a car from California to a buyer in British Columbia who saw it on Craigslist. It only takes a few clicks to search for cars in other cities and there are even some new sites out there that help you search Craigslist in multiple cities at the same time. In other words, it can work well and it’s free, but of course there are some downsides. First, unless you are selling something particularly rare, your listing will sink to the bottom of the search results rapidly since results are sorted by time listed. Furthermore, Craigslist doesn’t have any standard form of classification. On most sites a shopper can quickly set search parameters like make, model, year, even color. Craigslist relies only on the text you put into your listing and some sellers either leave out or misspell important information or adulterate the results by keyword spamming. Using Craigslist properly can take a bit of practice but a good listing is still key.
Stumble It!
There are a number of ways to advertise your car and they vary in the amount of time you’ll take to list and sell. The amount of effort expended is usually proportional to the effectiveness of the means. For example, probably the cheapest and easiest thing to go is to put a “For Sale” sign in your car window and drive around for weeks hoping that the right buyer sees it.
Next is putting an ad in the local newspaper. It isn’t hard to think of a three-line text ad and hope the phone rings… but you may find this method expensive and increasingly ineffective as more and more shoppers turn to other mediums to shop.
Online advertising is quickly becoming the preferred method for finding a car to buy. Recent studies show that for the first time more than half of all cars were bought as a result of an online search. For buyers, online ads or auctions offer a number of clear advantages over print. We’ll discuss how to turn these to your advantage later:
• Timeliness
- Ads are literally live within minutes of the seller making it available.
- Perhaps more importantly, they can be removed when the car is sold… nobody enjoys calling ads only to find that the car was sold weeks earlier.
- It is now easy to widen your search for a particular vehicle beyond your local town if you are willing to expand your search… which is now easier to do.
- Cars with the right combination of condition, color, mileage, and options are out there… just perhaps not right around the corner.
- Some of these sites have millions of different cars listed.
- Instead of a short blurb an Internet ad can include a rich description of the car and dozens of photos.
- Buyers can eliminate vehicles from their list for reasons like mileage, condition, color, or option content without having to make calls or drive all over town.
- Many sites offer quick access to information like value guides, vehicle data (fuel economy, make/model comparisons, etc.), available financing options, and more.
- As a result, shoppers are more educated than ever and can quickly compare your vehicle and price to others
So, it appears that an online ad is the place to be, but now which web site do I use? Let’s examine the different types of sites.
Online Classifieds – These are sites where you can present information about your vehicle with the intent of driving a lead to you by phone or email. These tend to lean toward geographical listings (“enter your zip code to find cars near you”) because buyers and sellers are intending to meet each other in person. There are number of these sites out there, including car club sites for brand-specific interest groups. Some are free like Craigslist and Google Base and others charge a listing fee like Cars.com and Autotrader.com .
Online Marketplaces – Sites where negotiations or even the entire transaction can be consummated online. The biggest and most widely known is eBay Motors, the automotive section of eBay. There are a few others but they tend to be focused primarily on classic cars (gofastauctions, for example). eBay Motors listings can also function as a classified ad. In addition to the well-known online auction, they allow sellers of vehicles to list cars with a fixed price and offer a classifieds format with a “best offer” price negotiation tool. A lot of shoppers also look for cars on eBay but contact sellers by email or phone because they aren’t quite comfortable with the idea of an unseen car purchase.
So, where should you list? My suggestion is to list in as many of these places as you can. But understand a few points. First, in most cases it will take time to create a compelling listing on each site unless you use a service like Mota’s which takes care of this for you. Second, with the exception of Craigslist.org most of the classifieds sites are focused primarily on car dealers. Dealers typically send hundreds of listings at a time and they often get premium placement in search results on top of listings by individuals. Your experience may vary but take a look at search results for cars like yours and see how many there are and how many are from dealers.
Certainly put that for sale sign in the window while you are at it as well because lightning may strike but you want to use the Internet to maximize your exposure and speed up your time to sell. Some sites have millions of visitors every month (eBay Motors claims over 12.5 million unique visitors to the Motors category every month… making it the largest-trafficked automotive site out there). Some other sites have many more listings than they have visitors.
Craigslist is an interesting site. It’s both free and, in many parts of the country, gets tremendous traffic. The site is organized geographically (a site for each city or region, for example) but many sellers report calls from many states away. I even sold a car from California to a buyer in British Columbia who saw it on Craigslist. It only takes a few clicks to search for cars in other cities and there are even some new sites out there that help you search Craigslist in multiple cities at the same time. In other words, it can work well and it’s free, but of course there are some downsides. First, unless you are selling something particularly rare, your listing will sink to the bottom of the search results rapidly since results are sorted by time listed. Furthermore, Craigslist doesn’t have any standard form of classification. On most sites a shopper can quickly set search parameters like make, model, year, even color. Craigslist relies only on the text you put into your listing and some sellers either leave out or misspell important information or adulterate the results by keyword spamming. Using Craigslist properly can take a bit of practice but a good listing is still key.
Labels: Cars Online, MotaMoney, Sell My Car
Stumble It!
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