Selling cars on forum

[Ameiseuk]

Originally Posted by Joe2.0E

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
A serious buyer that really wants a well looked after A8/S8 will register as a member.
Who wants Tyre Kickers/Time Wasters/Test Pilots ?

[erubus]

I have a couple of my fleet on Gumtree at the moment, the D2 and one of the A3s. As I had expected I haven't had a great deal of interest on the D2 as its a bit of a niche car. What I have had though, are people phoning at ridiculous times of the night (0130 for instance) and offering silly money. So many time wasters on that site.

The A3 is even worse. Probably getting three or four calls/emails/texts a day again offering stupid money and its really getting annoying. So far only one person has actually come to view the thing and when he arrived (in the middle of the night in the pitch black) he started with the silly offers. even when I dropped the price from £950 to £750 to end the torment he still quibbled and tried to get another £25 off it. by this point I gave up and told him to take it or leave it and he left it haha.

When I get home I'm going to post the cars I have for sale on here. If they generate interest then all good and well. To be honest the A3s probably won't. Lets face it the clientele here are looking for something a litttle nicer haha but as with above comments people on here arfe more likely to be genuinely interested if they are looking and not tyre kiclers or timewasters.

An amusing story regarding the D2. I got a call from a polish number. guy with a very heavy accent and poor english. "I'm leaving for england tomorrow morning to buy your car. I will be a your house at (whatever time he said) and I will be taking your car for £450 (its advertised for £850) you will not argue with my price because that is all it is worth." His answer was sustained laughter and a couple of choice words.

Moral of the story is that in my opinion, forum for sale sections should be for members only as there are plenty other sites available for getting inundated with tyre kickers, time wasters and chancers.

gill

[IT]

So, my ten penneth.

As Neil rightly points out, we've tried it both ways.

I firmly believe what we have now, works best for these reasons:

* If we make the advert public but read only, how does anyone contact the seller? they have to sign up anyway....

* Or, worse still, you advertise your phone number or email address and get spammed as many bots pick them up automatically

* Forcing users to sign up to be able to read, actually means that when they want help / comment / communicate etc. they are already registered and can do. We used to get a lot more frustrated people nagging to get their registration approved before because they could see what they wanted, but couldn't do anything about it

* This forum is a wealth of valuable information. Its freely available to those that register. Its not a big price to pay for what you get.

The active users on the forum doubled since mandating registration - There were a lot of lurkers. That's a lot of people reading info, but not contributing. Its so much easier to contribute when you've already been forced to register

So valid question raised, and yes we could drive more traffic by opening it up, but really we're a quiet discrete bunch and don't really want all that much attention. There are no ads, no revenue generating items on here. Driving traffic here isn't a success unless a user is contributing something. Yes, we have the top banner advertising parts but in reality a8parts is much more about the whole Audi range these days, and new parts too, so there's no tangible commercial gain there...

We just do it for the love....