Recently I was trying to sell an old mountain Bike through Classifieds. I advertised this bike both in my local newspaper and in a few online classifieds, all were free sites, but had a fair amount of readers and traffic.
I tried to advertise my item with different prices between print classifieds and the online classifieds. The difference in price ranged from ten to about fifty dollars; the bike was worth around three hundred dollars. After a few hours of posting my ad on these online classifieds, I had already received eight responses to all my different ads and their different prices. Two days later my newspaper classified was published and I received only three responses even though the newspaper classifieds had the lowest prices for the bike. I exchanged some emails with potential buyers from my web classifieds that had the higher advertised prices, including some pics. I then emailed the interested people from the lower priced advertisements and told them that I had offers closer to the higher advertised prices. They all responded back and one way or the other submitted a better price offer, after exchanging more details about the bike through emails. I was then able to sell the bike at the highest price of just over three hundred and fifty dollars.
This example illustrates that classifieds are able to be used to gauge or negotiate an appropriate market price for an item. It can also be used as a bargaining tool for a seller in a similar way to an auction site. This technique also allows sellers to advertise to different group of readers and demographic markets as some users will prefer newsprint over online media classifieds. This also allows the seller to be in control of the transaction price by having multiple offers to select from.
online classified