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October 28, 2009
The tale of two auto marketplaces
I always like first hand data. Here is some first hand data from by brother who just sold his 15 year old Toyota pick-up
“The Craigslist syndrome - too many flakey people who want everything for nothing. I just sold my pickup truck. I listed in on Autotrader, Craigslist and vFlyer. Every contact I got from Autotrader was a good, solid person who had money and was interested in buying a truck. Every contact I got from Craigslist was either a kook, a lowballer or a righteous pundit who wanted to tell me all the things that were wrong with my ad, my truck, etc. Never got a single serious lead from Craigslist. Sold the old truck for 5k to a nice gal off of Autotrader. She paid cash and knew that she was getting a good buy.”
My brother’s experience gets to the heart of the issue many sellers have with on-line marketplaces: They want qualified buyers and as low signal to noise ratio as possible. While the #1 benefit of any marketplace is scale, enough buyers and sellers, once over that threshold, reducing friction is the #1 benefit. It seems that AutoTrader in cars is doing a good job reducing friction between buyer and seller delivering quality experience on both ends. I am going to ask him why he didn’t list on eBay. Most likely the cost. If you can get it sold on the free market places, why?
The take away for me is to provide a low friction, high traffic marketplace for a low cost. That is what we are doing at Kashless.org for the Free Category.
Posted by Martin at October 28, 2009 2:45 PM
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