My experience selling a 2003 Volvo V40 online:
Advertised price: $6,820
Same price, photos and description on Carsales.com.au and Gumtree:
Carsales:
Cost: $65
Visits: 70
Enquiries: 0
People who had a look at the car: 0
Gumtree:
Cost: $0
Visits: 194
Enquiries: 4
People who had a look at the car: 3
Sold for $6,500 through Gumtree.
What a waste of time and money, advertising on carsales.com.au. Gumtree would have been enough!
No, there were no issues or weird enquiries. I just regret that I spent $65 on a service that had zero value. Thought that that might be valuable information for some fellow Ozbargainers.
Funny story, a close family friend of ours is a tour guide who takes foreigners (from his native country) on tours in the Australian outback. He uses Toyotas for his trips. Turns them over every 3-4 years, maintains them meticulously, and sells them with ultra-high KMs.
Anyway, I believe last year he was selling his Prado (2009), it had high KMs, and so he listed it as the cheapest one on carsales for that year by a significant amount.
He got an email saying "I'm from a mining company… would like to buy your vehicle…will be coming from interstate…etc."
Friend was apprehensive about the situation, but organised for the guy to come see/buy the car, gave him his bank details (as requested), and waited.
Started to become more and more worried that this was a scam.
Day before the meet up, he logged into this online bank, found the full amount for the car had been deposited in his account. O_O
Next day, the guy arrived in a taxi fromt he airport, at the agreed time, got out, had a look around the car said "WOW! it's even better condition that I expected, it looks fantastic! Look, I gotta run and get this car back to Kalgoorlie by Friday, here is the paper work, please sign your name….etc."
Signed the papers, and off he went. And that was it.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it….might not actually be a duck.
For many years, this man has been trying to purchase a vehicle back home while working very hard on an oil rig to provide for his family, and all he got was people calling him scammer. Good to hear he has finally succeeded
Yep, especially for cheaper vehicles <$10,000 I wouldn't bother with Carsales when buying or selling.
But for newer vehicles, $10000 or more, Carsales has been OK. That said, many dealers use both G-tree & C-sales now. Would be interesting to hear their views on it (effectiveness of each).
+1
@OP It depends on the price of the car. Most people don't bother putting up cheap cars on Carsales, therefore those who are after inexpensive cars check Gumtree more. But I'm pretty sure the results will be quite the opposite if you try to sell a 10k+ car.
Wow that is a great comparison thank you. Completely agree when selling my last car, what a waste of time and money with carsales.
Same experience here with bikesales vs gumtree. I've sold 4 bikes in the last 2.5yrs and 3 of them was sold on gumtree and 1 on bikesales.
My partner and I each sold our cars around the same time a year ago and used both. Mine was ~$8000 and hers $2500.
Carsales worked for me and Gumtree worked for her. In both cases, particularly hers, Gumtree seemed to attract a lot of low ballers, no shows and tyre kickers compared to Carsales.
I had the same experience. Quite happy with Gumtree.
OT, but I refuse to use Gumtree because they seed misleading/fake results into Google searches.
Sold my last car and bike on gumtree. When i sold my bike i did get an obvious scammer though.
Yikes, and I was expecting a 'Gumtree is full of crap lowballers' stereotype to perpetuate.
I'm sure it's happened on CarSales too but you hear of those hot V8 hoon cars getting stolen or joy ridden by randoms that saw the ads on Gumtree. Then again could just be CarSales PR team writing the stories and spamming them out to journos to make GT look bad or worse. ;-p
Chances are CS isn't the place for under $8k cars as the fee is sort of too high mentally. For a higher selling price the fee is much smaller percentage way, it's almost a rounding error. Could be lots more traffic/eyeballs on GT.
There are more bargains and lower priced cars on GT so that could explain it. Thanks for the post!
Whenever there is a free option, use that first and if it doesn't work go to the paid option.
Most people will never look at gumtree for cars, especially better more expensive cars, so if you have a decent car, you wouldn't want to not connect to the 90% of people who wouldn't check gumtree for the sake of $65.
I suppose do both as Gumtree is free, as is Carsguides, The Age (drive), Trading Post etc. as Carsales effectively killed their car advertising space.
I remember growing up in Melb and the Sat The Age newspaper car section was about 3-4cm thick. A 5 x 1cm ad was like $50, but that's what you had to pay because every serious car seller/buyer looked at The Age in Melbourne.
Gumtree tends to attract cheaper car ads compared to Carsales.
That said, I bought a $7000 car on gumtree, fixed a few things for about $1000, club raced it for 6 months, sold it for 12000 on Carsales after 2 days of advertising.
I did put it on gumtree for 2 weeks and had no end of time wasters and idiots offering to swap me 7 kinds of commodores and a Harley.
Personally, if I was selling a cheap car under $10k I'd go gumtree first and deal with the idiots, but for anything more expensive I'd pay the $65 which is worth weeding out the time wasters and morons.
In a way, thinking from the buyers perspective, if the seller is too tight to spend $65 advertising their car, how well have they treated/serviced their car in all the time they've owned it?
I tried both sites recently, selling a Merc. asking $34K, sold it on carsales for $33K cash in a week, had no enquires from Gumtree.
Can't imagine anyone on gumtree has $34k judging by some of the responses I've got in the past.
I have had several vehicles, and Motorbikes over the last few years for sale. I will never use carsales again.
I found all the genuine enquiries I got came from Gumtree. The amount of hits was far greater.
The last time I used carsales was selling a BF Mk.2 Wagon, I had this on carsales for months, then I listed it on Gumtree and I found 3 genuine enquiries, and sold in a week. In my opinion I think carsales,for all the useless stats and fany user interface is completely overpriced and over rated.
Just my personal experience, I will not be using it again.
Ugh sorry, accidentally negged your comment wHile scrolling on phone, only just realised, can't revoke now :(
Balanced.
Further to my previous comment, yes I have had lowballers and people wanting to swap me boats etc.
But I am an adult, and I can deal with this, usually the low lowballers will email or at worst text you.
Simply ignore them. scammers. well they are a dime a dozen and I don't see many anymore, except the ones who want you to deal with an email address, an obvious give away.
Like most people I normally load 10-15% on the price I want, and then it allows the negotiating from real buyers to ensue.
kewl, thanks for sharing - ill take a chance on gummiebears website now
i think it's all about demographics, you have to research who visits carsales and who visits gumtree, factor in what you are selling and away you go! personally i have had mostly good results on gumtree with tech gear, even compared to feebay, yes i know there are more items and sellers there, but the fee savings make it worthwhile especially for the more expensive items, my attitude is simple, list it for free on gumtree first, wait a week or two, if unsold try the paid options, you've got nothing to lose
in my experience with caresales I have found it is better to pay for premium ad from the get go. far more exposure, more photos etc
I wouldn't bother with a cheap car though ($115 is pretty steep) but it is well worth it for a $10k+ car which you would easily recover with a good sale.
It all depends on the type of car. I sold my girlfriends car ($4k) on gumtree fine. Took four weeks. But when I tried to sell a $50k BMW 125i on gumtree I found myself dealing with tyrekickers and dodgy types. I paid to list it on carsales and it sold for a little less than my asking price after a few weeks.
I guess you get what you pay for. People expect to find better quality cars on carsales and cheaper ones on gumtree. Horses for courses i reckon.
I encountered a dealer posing as private on gumtree that sold me a lemon.
Bought two and sold one on carsales <10k. Did occur to me to sell that car on gumtree because I had such a bad experience hence I cannot compare the number of responses I got.
Sold and bought many other things on gumtree. Probably would not go to gumtree for cars. One main issue is that I am not looking for a particular make/model/year so I can customize how narrow/broad my search is on carsales.
Carsales help the sellers with details about their car that would be left up to the seller to list manually on gumtree. I found this helps a lot with non-native english speakers (I found a number of ads on gumtree that did not provide me the required infomation, had to contact the seller to figure it out).
I like to have the information at my fingertips before I contact the seller. It also helps to see how long the cars are on sale, how the price moves and from there figure out the taste of the market Usually a lot more information and how you can manipulate the lists on carsales. Found it much harder to view cars according to a certain specification on gumtree.
Lastly, I don't want to encounter large scale private sellers, auction flippers, dealers that pretend to be private sellers and general dodgy types that seem to be more prevalent on gumtree COMPARED to carsales.
Great topic, OP. Thanks for posting. Always wondered about this. Thanks to everyone for offering advice. Really feel like I've gained something (aside from cheap eneloops) from ozbargain today.
Thank you for taking the time to prepare this thread.
Your results don't surprise me as I got the same feedback from my father when he tried to sell his car.
I think carsales is purely for dealerships these days.
Private seller: posted his ad on the morning of Sunday October 19.
Sunday afternoon. My sister had a miserable time around used car dealerships, and was heading home. She called me on the way.
From my home 1000km away, I found the ad mentioned above. Referred her, she test drove and placed a deposit that evening.
There's always exceptions.
In our case, I think it was purely because of the ad money Carsales is paying Google. Their results were on page one.
How long did it take you to sell the car? Those visits seem low compared to the last time I was car shopping.
More feedback for those contemplating advertising on carsales.com.au.
We advertised for three weeks on both Carsales and Gumtree. 15 enquiries on Gumtree until we finally accepted an offer, ZERO enquiries from Carsales. Waste of money advertising on Carsales!! Rather spend the money promoting your Gumtree ad, every time you "bump up" the ad you receive enquiries, and you do that until you receive an offer close to what you listed it for, a bit of haggling, and presto you have sold you car. You can also spend your savings by investing in a PPRS report (on the Personal Properties Security Register), costs $25 or $36 (2 options), you can email this report to prospective buyers. Carsales may make it easy by pre-filling fields but the Gumtree site does much the same, you just need to enter the VIN nr (instead of the reg plate nr like on Carsales) and all the specifics are still pre-filled for you, just type your own narrative. Only 5 views on Carsales vs 244 on Gumtree. Don't waste your money.
i had the same experience selling an old mx5. got "serious" enquiries from 3 people on gumtree (ultimately sold to one of them) and got a bunch of silly offers from carsales. not worth the money from my experience.
Did any of those 4 gumtree enquiries come from someone who is currently working far away at some remote oil rig and wanting to send someone to pick up the car? :D