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Trying to sell my car with a bootstrapped website and an idea (2012mazda3.com)
5 points by cvanderlinden 4865 days ago
7 comments

Nice. I considered selling a house this way about six months ago, but I ended up selling it to a neighbor. Edit: One idea I had: allow people to reserve a spot on the calendar, perhaps with a deposit. You'll get the benefit of a traditional rising auction that way and it might avoid hard feelings if multiple people jump as the price falls a notch. Would you mind putting your code up on Github?
I will definitely do that in the future. Needs some cleaning up though since I built it and launched it in only a few hours. Rush job to get it on the Internet.
That is clever! Also you may want to ask the bidder to put down a deposit of earnest money so you know they are serious about their offer. If you like, you can post it on classifieds site HouseOfNothing and I will bulk post it to many other websites through Digi-Go ad submission service to give your ad more exposure.
Yeah, there is the risk that the bidder is just messing around with me, so the deposit might be a good idea. Thanks for the tips about spreading the news, that will definitely help.
I ran digital/social marketing for a major import car brand for two years up until Q4 of last year. We built something like this but, it was killed internally by an executive. It is a great idea and my studies say it will raise sales price on cars by 5-8% because of the "fear of losing out" principal.
Great! I hope it works for me, I will be writing a blog post about it on my site at http://cvanderlinden.com once it's all finished!
> The car's price will start at $23,000 on Monday, Febuary 20, at 12:00 am

1) Today is not a Monday.

2) It's currently higher that the stated starting price, at $23,300.

Other than that, interesting concept.

Thanks, for the feedback. I will change that!
Dutch auction over a long period. You know this is equivalent to a sealed first bid right?

Interesting nonetheless.

Dutch auction! I didn't know there was a name for it! Very cool!
Isn't it a good idea to remove the license plate number from the photos? We do that here in US.
I don't think it's a big deal. Not much theft, and otherwise what can people do with my licence plate? I drive around with it in public vision all day.
btw, love the site. Its clean and simple. and great photos too.
Appreciate the feedback very much, thank you! Thank my friend for letting me use his expensive property to shoot the photos.
How are you publicizing the site? Through Craiglist? What's the clickthrough rate?
Craigslist, facebook, twitter, usedvictoria, and auto trader. No stats yet. I will post on my blog at http://cvanderlinden.com with the results of this experiment.