August 27th 2008

Finally it was time the trusty old Honda Civic hatchback that had given 24 years of relatively trouble free motoring apart from the odd muffler, battery and a couple of sets of tyre replacements (plus of course the obligatory cambelt replacement) to be passed on. Car dealers especially those that sell you brand new sparkly ones, don't want to know your shabby cast off and the more down market ones want your vehicle at a give-away price, give it a spit of polish and charge 3 times the purchase price in their yard. So it was a leap into the unknown that we thought we'd give TradeMe a try. The last time I traded a vehicle the TradeMe vehicle auction market didn't exist and I got bugger all for it, and we tried selling a car from a deceased family members estate through Turners Car Auctions with about the same success rate, so we had nothing to lose.

The TradeMe auction site leads you through a series of questions for setting up your ad which is a good process as it standardises the vehicle information displayed for prospective browsing purchasers. One little trap that I missed to start with is that if you have two addresses (our main verified one is in the country), the ad uses the first one. We were selling the car in the city and couldn't change the displayed address for inspection and pickup from Cheviot to the second recorded address. That problem was overcome by adding an extra wording after the auction had started. You can only re-edit your ad before a bid has been placed so you need to check it over very carefully and make the adjustments early on. We decided to price the reserve at the miserable amount a car yard would offer us and take it from there. The strategy was for a short sharp campaign, 4 days and closing off at 7pm to give the masses time to get home. That has seemed to work especially as you have to be available over that time for people to inspect the car. When you don't expect a whole heap of dosh for it, it's easy to be able to point out the faults and I ended up going out of my way to point out all the blemishes. As Angela said, the car was a bit like her, good motor, but the body showing a bit of wear and tear. I guess the feature selling point was that is was one owner from new, had only done 117k and it wasn't an import.

Seeing the auction play out is quite fun. The seller is able to view the number of "watchers", (those that have bookmarked the auction to follow the progress). You can get a good feel of whether there's much interest in what you're selling if the number of watchers grows and a day out from our auction close there were over 50 watchers registered. Two days out there were a couple of early bidders testing the waters and then about 5 hours before close those that probably took the time to view the car came on the scene. The real action comes 10 minutes before close and despite over 60 watchers only 3 were in at the kill. Every vendors dream is two bidders wanting the item and we were lucky enough to have them. At the final bell we had twice our reserve and a bit to spare. The initial listing cost $39. TradeMe tries to prise extra cash from you with bold listings, extra promotion etc. I thought I'd give it a go first with a plain vanilla listing and I don't think paying any extra money would made any difference in the end. A further $39 was charged after the sale as a success fee.

Would we sell our loved bomb this way again? You betcha!

TC