Craigslist is a haven for the car-obsessed. The site's car buying and selling section is a simple, easy way to find cool cars for sale, or sell a car without fuss. In the 20-plus years of the site's existence, the service has been free, whether you were buying or selling a car, truck, or anything else. Well, that's about to change. Starting April 15th, 2019, Craigslist will now implement a $5 fee to list a car or truck for sale.
The news comes from Craigslist's listing page. If you go to list a car or truck by owner, a message on the side of the selection box reads "please note - $5 fee per ad starting April 15." The news first appeared on Reddit, and I was able to find the message myself when going through the listing process.
I probably won’t describe this very well, but I feel like there is a category of car listings on CL usually defined by some combination of “NO TEXTS, NO EMAILS, CASH ONLY, WILL ONLY DEAL FACE-TO-FACE” statements in the listing. Sometimes minimal and/or poor quality pics and information, poor grammar and spelling, etc.
I get the sense that these listings are made by people (or a proxy) who maybe don’t know a bunch about the car, or maybe are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with technology and are hesitant to put personal information on THE INTERNET. But, it’s free and they’re willing to put aside their discomfort to unload a car. IMHO this category contains some of the more fun discoveries and interesting cars on CL. I wonder if the payment requirement will now be one step too much for these sellers and the stuff I’m most interested in will drop off.
Yeah, that's what I'm concerned about. It isn't the money here that's a potential problem, it's the convenience/ sense of security. Is listing a car worth $5? Sure, I could probably vacuum $5 worth of loose change out of my couch right now. Is listing a car worth putting my credit card information into Craigslist? Eh...
I'm sure they will be monitoring all other categories to see if vehicles start getting listed where they aren't supposed to be. Could be a quick way to get your email/account blocked for repeat offenders.
I am looking forward to seeing how this will change my daily searches where I frequently see: multiple listings for a single vehicle, spam/bot-like listings, and listing that have basically no information or photos at all. I hope this will help generate more complete and better quality listings for vehicles overall.
My last two vehicle purchases were found on CL - one private party and one small car lot. I have two I want to sell this summer. Guess I’ll need to add $5 to the selling price.
Seems like they're happy to just hand over this portion of their traffic to Facebook Marketplace. Ah well, nobody uses craigslist up here anyways, it's all Kijiji in eastern Canada.
It is, but like the rest of Facebook it's pretty inept. There's good stuff listed there and it gives you the advantage of seeing who is actually list things, but boy is it difficult to navigate. It seems to be mostly posts of items that have been sold for months that people just haven't taken down, and there isn't any obvious way to sort listings by date posted, so if you search for something 95% of the ads were posted "over a week ago." At least that's my experience with it.
My post was in reference to the canned buyer inquiries that FB used to helpfully send with a single (often errant) push of a button, including one phrased like that. Not sure if they finally binned that feature or what.
My biggest complaints seem to have been mentioned already: People posting vehicles for sale on 25 different regional craigslists, meaning it's only local for 1 out of the 25, people who keep reposting their car for sale instead of just updating the ad, and spammers listing their car 17 times, just with a different photo on each one and slightly different words for each ad. Hopefully the listing fee helps with that stuff.
CL has charged for various postings for many years. Real estate and job listings were fee-based at least 15 years ago. Of note, the listing fees are geographic in nature. Posting a job in SF will cost you $75. It'll cost you $45 in LA and NYC, $25 in Omaha and $15 in Billings, Montana.
Not really. Tons and tons of people don't have Facebook, vs Craigslist which is open to all. And the traffic makes that clear - in 2018, the last year for which data is available, Marketplace saw an average of 18 million listings per month, and Craigslist had about 60 million. However, Marketplace is growing in listings per month, whereas Craigslist listings have remained relatively flat.
I invision him as the Singer for late 80s early 90s Mercedes-Benz models.
The W124 - Reimagined by MethHead™
Looks like this person is working on a 190 as well...
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