What is up with Craigslist

[kevin nee]

I have had some very good luck with Craigslist in the past . (Tools, wood etc) lately there are a lot of kooks trying to sell junk for a lot of money. Has any on found a similar site that sells all over like Craigslist does

[Chris Padilla]

I don't think it is a 'lately' issue so much as the norm. Any time I put an ad to sell stuff on CL, the first 3-4 responders are ones I rarely here back from.

For example, I just put my car on there 2 days ago. I've gotten 4 responses. One guy simply sent this to me: 3000$. I guess that is a (lowball) offer? One guy I responded to wanted to call me right away and he did and seems the most genuinely interested. The other two I responded to but haven't heard back and quite frankly I don't expect to. I'm still waiting for the scam response to show up but perhaps my car price isn't high enough to filter through to them. :)

When I search for items, there are always high-priced stuff on there...I just pass on it no biggie. eBay, really, isn't much different some times. Some stuff in both places are higher than retail.

[Brian Elfert]

Craigslist is really the only site with a huge following. There is Kijiji.com, but they are mostly popular in Canada. In the USA, Kijiji is now Ebay Classifieds, but still free. I searched for John Deere in my area and came up with 20 ads. There are over 1,600 ads for John Deere on Craigslist.

If Craigslist started charging then it would take care of a lot of the folks posting junk at high prices. I put up with some of the BS on Craigslist because it is free. The one thing I wish Craigslist would do is come up with a way to stop constant re-posting of the same ads over and over again. They should compare new ads to previous ones from the same account or IP address and not allow the new ad if it is a duplicate. People would just make tiny changes to defeat this, but it makes them do more work than just the exact same ad every day.

[Moses Yoder]

I would suggest starting your own site. You could hire people to filter the ads for you, and eliminate the ones that are high priced junk. Really not a bad option if you can finance it.

[Kevin Bourque]

I always have great luck with craigslist.

Just yesterday I bought a Rigid Tristand ( holds pipe while cutting or threading ) in fantastic condition for $50. They retail for over $400.

What bothers me is the people who have their ad up for days or even weeks and never respond to the 16 Emails I send them!!!

[Myk Rian]

What bothers me is the people who have their ad up for days or even weeks and never respond to the 16 Emails I send them!!!
Or don't answer back, then raise the price. Had some goof ball do that on me with an incomplete lathe. He thought he had a gold ingot on his bench.

[Jim Matthews]

Part of it is the area in which you search.

Sellers in the Worcester area are often reselling
"cleanouts" and have no idea of recent selling prices.

Search "lumber" and dig a little.
I think if you searched a little further West
(Western Mass) you would find more
realistic offerings.

I'm in the Fall River/New Bedford drainage basin
and a full third of the adverts are just resellers.

It's a waiting game.

[Rich Riddle]

Most of the time the sellers are decent, but I too have recent very bad luck. Twice sellers didn't materialize. One was home and refused to answer the door because she decided to sell the item to a neighbor instead. I tried calling prior to going there but got a recording. Her neighbor backed out and she tried listing again. Apparently she had several potential buyers to whom she did the same thing.

[Brian Elfert]

What bothers me is the people who have their ad up for days or even weeks and never respond to the 16 Emails I send them!!!

I've had issues in the past with email from Craigslist buyers going into the spam folder with Gmail. I do check the spam folder occasionally after placing an ad on Craigslist.

[ken masoumi]

I get so excited when I see a reasonable price on an item that I feel like emailing the seller to congratulate them for being sensible.

[Mel Miller]

I would suggest starting your own site. You could hire people to filter the ads for you, and eliminate the ones that are high priced junk. Really not a bad option if you can finance it.

If you think it's that easy to do, why not show the rest of us how it's done?