Thoughts on selling cars privately

[blangoman]

As stated in an earlier post - the sales team are very slick and communicative. They will get your auction live with an agreed reserve only to call you even on a Sunday with a couple hours of the auction to run and demand you remove the reserve so they can initiate their last pump marketing on Instagram, Facebook and other platforms to maximise the bidding war. The chap was very passive aggressive. Seemingly they can't provide that level of marketing with out the reserve being lifted. Whilst they remain a business for profit and interested in the 6% commission they could extend this into having a level of awareness that some Classic car sellers are parting with a belonging that extends past a block of metal and rubber.

 

[rockits]

One other thing I have thought about as well with all these new style car auction sites like Collecting Cars is how they prevent shill bidding that has blighted Ebay and other auctions for years. You used to get it at physical car auctions with bids bouncing off the walls and it was/is rife on Ebay.

How do you know on these sites if the competing bidders are genuine and the bids are genuine. You could be paying a lot more for a car than you need to be if you're not careful.

 

[Paulg390]

One other thing I have thought about as well with all these new style car auction sites like Collecting Cars is how they prevent shill bidding that has blighted Ebay and other auctions for years. You used to get it at physical car auctions with bids bouncing off the walls and it was/is rife on Ebay.

How do you know on these sites if the competing bidders are genuine and the bids are genuine. You could be paying a lot more for a car than you need to be if you're not careful.

I think the deterent maybe the immediate deduction of a non refundable (except in exceptIonal circumstance) £600 or 6% of the final price from the winners credit card ... so a shill bidder would have to be pretty confident their bid wasn’t going to win it ?

 

[rockits]

Ah, OK. I see. Fair enough. Makes sense.

 

[Simon1963]

The thing is with these auction site as has been said before is the 6% buyers premium. In the spring if I can shift my BMW 650 individual for a reasonable price I’ll be looking for a QPV or a 4200. But then to my mind you would want a proper ppi,which isn’t going to be Cheap or easy to arrange, so then if the car is say 15k your going to be looking at well over 1k in fees or if you don’t win the auction a good few hundred quid for a ppi when you haven’t a clue what the car is going for. So once the beemer is gone I’ll have an ask about on here to see if anything is for sale.

 

[rockits]

Agreed this is very much a flaw of this site and I don't see how this model can work for many of the cars on the site unless the buyer just buys blind. As you mention if you need to spend say £500 on a PPI or view the car then PPI but don't win the auction you are out of pocket. You could say the same of any car but at least you have the option of working as deal with the seller as you normally would. With this auction site there isn't that option.