Should You Sell Your Car On eBay?
If you have a car to sell, you may hear that you should turn to eBay.com. Ebay is a popular online auction website. Millions of internet users use the website to buy and sell goods, including cars. For most individuals, eBay is a great way to sell a car. For others, it is not.
If you are unsure if you should use eBay to sell your vehicle, continue reading on for a list of five signs you should not. These signs do not necessarily mean you should avoid eBay.com. They mean you should consider the pros and cons first. So, when is eBay not a good way to sell a car?
1. If You Have Bad eBay Feedback
In the past year, eBay changed their feedback ratings. Now, not everyone is rated. Still, old ratings show up. If you regularly agreed to buy items and did not pay, you may have received negative ratings. If you sold items but misrepresented or waited to long to ship the merchandise, you may have poor eBay feedback.
When buying a product online, especially an expensive car, all interested buyers will look closely at your eBay feedback. If they see you are known for lying or misrepresenting yourself, they may run and fast. People want to do business with someone they trust, not someone who has a bad history of using the eBay.com website.
If you have a poor eBay feedback rating, try selling your car once or twice. If it does not work, focus on your local options.
2. If You Live in a Very Small Town
It isn’t a bad thing if you live in a small town, as all small towns are different. Your town may have a population of just 5,000 people but ten minutes away, there can be a large city. What you want to consider is the distance to the nearest populated area. If your average car buyer must travel two or three hours to buy your car, you may have few takers. With that said, some buyers are willing to travel far or pay to have the car shipped if it is a good deal, if the car is rare, or something they really want to have.
If you live in a small town, you can try selling your car on eBay first. The first four times, you are only charged when the car sells. On the fifth time, you are now charged an insertion fee too.
3. If You Want to Get the Most Money
Ebay is nice in that you can set your own price. That doesn’t however mean that people will buy your car. With that said, if they do, you still get less money. On average, it costs less than $10 to put an advertisement in a local newspaper and ‘for sale’ signs that go in car windows are cheap at the dollar store.
4. If You Aren’t a Savvy Internet User
Luckily, eBay.com makes it easy for people to buy and sell. After creating a free eBay account, you follow their step-by-step guide to create a listing. You must know how to take digital photographs and upload them to your computer. You must familiarize yourself with common eBay scams. For example, scammers will send you an email that looks like it is from eBay, but it is a fake duplicate website. You click on the link and log into the account and you gave away your personal information. For those unfamiliar with the internet, selling a car on eBay can be too risky.
5. If You Must Pay Someone to Help You
When people want to sell products on eBay, but don’t know how, they turn to a consignment shop. These are experienced internet and eBay users. They list an eBay auction under their name. They help you sell the item, but take a percentage of the sale. With a large item, such as a car or truck, the commission is high. Your helper may get $2,000 or more! That is too much money out of your own pocket.
Public Auto Auctions Are Excellent In Many Ways
So what exactly are public auto auctions? Public car auctions are events where you and dealers alike can purchase cars by bidding on them. You can have a ton of fun doing it, and you can get just what you want and pay just what you want.
Price getting too high? Just stop. You would pay a lot more for that cherry red convertible but no one else is bidding? Fantastic! That’s what common automobile auctions can do for you; you don’t have to be a slave to the demands of the dealer; you can buy the same way he does and avoid the markup.
There are a couple of ways to get a car or truck from public auto auctions. You can be traditional and attend the auction in person. In that case, you would join the others who are interested in getting a vehicle also, and you would raise your bid paddle when you have found the perfect vehicle for you.
Another way to buy from vehicle auctions is live via the Internet. Several auction houses now have real-time online bidding; if the auction is not located close to where you live, you can still bid on what you want right from your home PC, while others are bidding also. This is actual bidding just as if you were sitting there in the bidding gallery; you simply enter your bids via the computer instead of sitting there and holding your bid number up for the auctioneer assistant to see.
Sometimes, you can find a real bargain basement price for a car at truck/auto auctions. Several sites have cars that have been donated and offer those vehicles with no minimum bid. That means if you bid fifty bucks and no one else wants that particular vehicle, you can have your car for fifty bucks. How cool is that? Most of the time there is a reason that cars are donated, of course. They probably need work – maybe even a lot of work – but if you are mechanically inclined, why not?
If you want to add to your collection of vehicles, want to buy cheap and fix it up, need a reliable second car, or want to get a vehicle for any reason, there is no need to be limited any longer. You can buy your car the same way the dealers do – at auction. Public auto auctions are the way to go.
