Autotrader - www.autotrader.co.uk Review

“I placed an on-line ad to sell my car and paid £25...”

Written on: 26/11/2008 by spin26 (1 review written)

Good Points
Easy to set up advert and add photos.

Bad Points
Poor response to ad from legitimate buyers. Mostly
suspicious phone calls (070 prefix) and from overseas. Other sellers use tricks to get their cars listed higher. High cost of ad, especially given problems and poor response I've had.

General Comments
I placed an on-line ad to sell my car and paid £25 for two weeks. My last car sold through Auto Trader 3 years ago only cost £15. I got no response to ad for a week other than a company www.webuyanycar.co.uk even though I said 'no canvassers' in my ad. I also has a number of calls from 070 'personal numbers' and one from overseas. These types of numbers are allegedly linked with phone scams - call back and you'll be charged high rates or worse be exposed to fraud. Auto Trader realise this is a problem and offer a service that is designed to screen out these types of call by giving you a masked phone number in the ad. I didn't use the service because I think buyers would want to be sure that a car seller was also legitimate and would want call a land line number that can be linked to UK location. Another problem is that a lot of sellers (mostly traders) list mileages without the thousand's making their car come higher in the search results. This would be very easy for Auto Trader to fix - after all how many 1998 BMW cars have 120 miles on the clock?! Some traders also post ads to buy cays or sell other services using the same technique. I reported these problems to Auto Trader but have not had any response from them yet. It's a real shame that Auto Trader now seem to be suffering the same sort of problems that plague other on-line selling sites such as eBay. The UK credit crunch could explain the poor response rate to my ad, but the other issues should be tackled by Auto Trader to give me half a chance of buyers seeing my advert. I've used auto trader to sell two cars in the past with no problems, but this experience has put me off using Auto Trader ever again.

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