Is autotrader on the decline? (vehicles, 2009, buying, selling)
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During my search for a new car, I am not having much luck with autotrader.com as I have in the past. I don't know if its the vehicles I am trying to find or are people(and dealers) using it less and less. It seems people are using Craigslist more and more. I don't know if it is because it is free or what. Any one have any opinions or ideas, on other places to look for cars? I am all over ebay/craigslist/ and to a lesser extent cars.com
During my search for a new car, I am not having much luck with autotrader.com as I have in the past. I don't know if its the vehicles I am trying to find or are people(and dealers) using it less and less. It seems people are using Craigslist more and more. I don't know if it is because it is free or what. Any one have any opinions or ideas, on other places to look for cars? I am all over ebay/craigslist/ and to a lesser extent cars.com
Try Yahoo autos- They have good number of listings too, and you can sort out by owners/ dealers.
autotrader is still the go-to for dealer used car sales, but I'm unsure about private listings. I'm sure CL has stolen a bunch of their market due to the price.
Last time I listed a car for sale on autotrader (2009), I was inundated with solicitations, spam, and dealers. It did not seem that regular buyers were looking for private party sales on there anymore.
I have had far better success, and less hassle selling on Craigslist. Being free is just an added bonus!
Autotrader is good to search local dealer used inventory at once. Most of the dealers around here use it.
People are probably moving towards craigslist because there are no costs involved. I think autotrader chargers to post an ad.
While I've bought and sold cars on cragslist, I will never do it again because I got burned too bad both on the selling side and buying side. To look for cars I use autotrader to search for dealers.
Also, you can't beat the newspaper! Try that and see if you can find something.
I prefer cars from the 80s and early 90s so I haven't been on autotrader for years as most dealers don't have what I want. Craigslist is a lot better, I am not craigslist almost every day.
Just to make things easy, I use AutoTempest, which searches all the major sites, from CL to AutoTrader to Vehix to Cars.com.
Interestingly, there's a lot of cross pollination amongst the major sites. Found my Mustang on AutoTrader, however, but used AutoTempest to do the search.
Autotrader is pretty much the domain of dealers these days. Private sales aren't very common since AT charges for the listings and the private sales are competing with dealers who pay a premium to have their listings appear first.
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