I’ve had it! I’ve absolutely had it! Craigslist is a shell of its former self, leaving me with no choice but to sell my car parts on Facebook Marketplace. It’s a great platform in many ways, but it’s also severely flawed. Its worst problem is its inclusion of an automated response button for listings — a button that everyone I know loathes. But that wasn’t the only thing that made my attempt to sell some Jeep parts in LA a complete nightmare.
Have you ever had to sell something on Facebook Marketplace? If so, I’m sure you’ve become extremely, extremely tired of the phrase: “Hi [your name], is this still available?” It’s the auto-send message that Facebook lets people (and probably robots) send sellers, and it is unceasingly agitating. I just bought a Jeep Wrangler YJ with a hard top and two sets of doors. As I live in California, I have no interest in keeping that top, nor do I need the full-doors that accompany it; I’m a half door/soft top kind of man. I should be able to get at least $1200 out of that hard top and around a grand from those two doors, so I threw the parts up on Facebook Marketplace.
Here are the two listings:
The description for the door listing goes like this:
These YJ full doors are in very good condition! New paint, new interior panel, new mirrors; window seals are cracking, and there are tiny blemishes here and there. But these white doors look wonderful inside and out.
And here’s my description in the hardtop listing:
This hard top is in good condition. The glass handle will need to be taken off and either replaced or fixed, as twisting it doesn’t unlatch the glass (I just reach up and pull the cable by hand). There are a few minor imperfections on the outside, but overall the shape is good. The inside of the hardtop shows no cracking.
Sadly, it looks like I won’t be selling these Jeep parts anytime soon — at least not on Facebook Marketplace — because the app has become totally unusable. I have received no fewer than 70 messages about these two listings, and the vast majority have been of the automated variety. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s this little pre-filled box in the bottom right corner of a listing. Simply hit “send,” and the seller gets the automated message shown there: “Hi, is this available?”
Just look at this absurd number of mostly automated messages, all received in the span of 24 hours. The vast majority appear to have no interested in buying anything, and it’s not clear to me if these are humans or bots:
For some reason, no matter what I do with my post’s title, people keep thinking I’m selling the whole car. It’s gotten to a point that I think the world is messing with me. Look at Joshua here. I tell him I’m selling just the top, and he then replies “That’s all wrong, but does it work well? does it start and drive ok?”
A top, Joshua? Does a top start and drive OK? No, it doesn’t — it’s a freaking top!
A person named German seems confused as well, saying they’re interested in the [car emoji]. Again, it’s a hard top. It literally says “just the hard top” in the title!
Then there’s Eliel. He asks me if my Jeep’s doors are four-wheel drive. And when I reply that, hey, we’re just talking about doors here, he responds with: “is [it] 4×4?”
Eliel! No it’s not 4×4. Why would a hardtop need a drivetrain? What would those fours even represent? There are no wheels to drive! It’s 0x0!
Bahram managed to really crank up the level of discourse in my Facebook Marketplace inbox by replying to my hardtop listing with: “wath is mileg.”
Truly profound.
But among the people who enraged me most was this wise-guy, Geno. When he asks if he can pick up my hardtop, I tell him to bring a friend, for it’s rather heavy. “Wym does it run” he responds, apparently inquiring if my fiberglass hardtop somehow features an internal combustion engine, and if that engine runs.
I tell him it’s a top, and he seems to realize that I’m “not selling the keep.” I suggest that he look at the listing title; this seems to be something one should do prior to sending silly messages. He response with what I’m sure he knows is going to make my blood boil:
“You wanna sell the keep are not I have cash” — no punctuation, didn’t spellcheck a damn thing, just pure unadulterated annoyance in text form. Come on, Geno!:
Emilio was at least clear with his communication. “I want the whole car.” Fair enough, Emilio, but that’s not what’s for sale:
Ynnos decided to offer me $700 — half of my $1,400 asking price. And you know what? I wouldn’t be surprised if he, like the rest of Facebook Marketplace, thought he was offering me $700 for the whole rust-free, beautiful 4.0-liter YJ.
But nobody, I mean nobody, spiked my blood pressure as high as Yael, who I’m going to come right out and call a fool. I don’t like calling folks names, but what he did is the bane of any Facebook Marketplace-seller’s existence. He looked at my overall price, came up with a number way, way lower, and then sent that in the chat with absolutely no punctuation:
Screw you Yael. Screw you.
I’m largely kidding. I am somewhat amused by how poorly this is going, and I realize that some of the issue is a language barrier.
At this point, I’ve given up on selling this top and these doors. If I get 70 absurd messages a day, even if someone actually is interested in buying these parts sends me a note, it’s likely to be lost in the inbox of drivel. Facebook Marketplace is a shitshow.
You’re still new to SoCal so just know, it can get cold during the winter months, cold enough to require heat and, IMO, a hard top if using your Jeep (lows in the 40s is not uncommon). And, if you ever decide to take it to visit Big Bear, Mammoth, the desert, or north to Tahoe, you will be in temps below freezing. So, keep your doors and hard top for those occasions where your i3 won’t be a candidate for such excursions.
I have a manual ZJ for that!
well, you might at some point, for now it is simply a cat carrier.
LOL. In the upper Midwest, 40s is summer morning temperature.
He came from Michigan – lows in the 40s is not a big deal, and changing out a soft top for a hard top for a rare trip somewhere else is a real pain in the ass.
His blood will thin out real quick, trust me.
Lows in the 40s while driving without doors or a top is cold no matter where you’re from (New England guy here).
FB is not the social service company you think it is. Many replys to your ad are robots attempting to verify “you” so they can sell your data to advertising companies or worse, polical entities. Now they can feed you ads directed toward Jeep or adventure or what ever polical party thinks jeep owners support. FB makes a lot of money by data mining and selling. There are many suggestions on how to minimize this data capture but if you use Marketplace or FB at all remember they are not there to provide a service. FB is there to lure you in and capture your data so they can make money for themselfves and their shareholders.
You’d probably have better luck dragging the top next to a busy road and sticking a For Sale sign on it.
So, is this available?
My guy, you need to go on the dedicated forum and/or FB group for your car. I know without even looking that there are numerous Wrangler forums and groups, and probably even one or two just for YJs. Those are the places to buy and sell model-specific parts and niche cars! Most forums have decent moderation and activity requirements which keeps bots and scammers away. For my MR2 Spyder I almost exclusively use the forum to buy and sell parts. I recently bought a 1 year old soft top to replace mine from a guy for $700 and it was a great experience.
Reminder to David…. You’re not in Troy anymore….
might be better off advertising on. Jeep page or forum.
I personally find the junk and crap quotient too high on FB Marketplace.
I sold a Winnebago for $10k on FB marketplace without any problems. Maybe it’s because I showed photos of exactly what I was selling; the moment I saw your listings had photos of the entire jeep I knew you were in for problems. And as others have said, you live in a very multi-cultural society now, and maybe you should compare misspellings in the replies to your own mastery of Mandarin or Portuguese, and chill, Cali style.
This is a fair take, but also- when I send messages in Spanish or Japanese I set my keyboard language to the respective language and it spellchecks for me! And I speak dunce level Spanish. On the flip side, the people writing keep we’re almost certainly sabotaged by autocorrect.
I hope the we’re/were typo was a deliberate one straight after keep/Jeep.
You’re right. Definitely language barriers, and that’s totally OK! I grew up in an Army family that moved around, so I get that! I guess the folks with the $200 offers and the “is this available” messages had me a little riled up.
Maybe I am old school, but I never used anything other than eBay. 20 years and so far, nothing major to complain about.
I think the real question here is why are you engaging these people?
I mean yes, they are both scammers, lowballers, and idiots but you are the one who is making yourself unhappy by interacting with them, why are you burning the time and effort?
Ignore the scam bots and true idiots. obnoxious lowball officers get a response of over asking price and if they respond get blocked.
That sweet sweet content.
Every time I’ve had to rent out a room on Gumtree I put a line at the bottom saying “yes this sis still available, if your message only asks if it’s still available, I will delete it”.
I still end up getting about 60% of replies like that, but I figure I save my self a lot of time by just deleting them.
Hmmm, tell us more about your available sis.
My strategy for dealing with junk replies that may-or-may-not be scammers, bots, or scambots is to simply ignore the message. There’s nothing to be gained from replying. Same goes for lowballers, and people who are trying to buy something that’s not for sale—those interactions have no chance of resulting in a successful transaction, so why even bother?
I just wait it out until I eventually get a reply that seems credible—something that appears to have been written by an actual human being who wants to buy what I’m selling—and then have conversations with those people. There aren’t many of them, but they exist. It’s annoying to sift through the sea of junk replies to find them, but it’s not actually very hard.
People who use the “Hi, is this still available”” button will get me to press the “Yes, it’s available” button instead of just summarily deleting their reply. They can have a second chance to act like a human being, as long as it’s very low-effort on my end. If they don’t give me a credible response after that, I ghost them.
It’s probably rude or something to just ignore people like that, but fuck it. Life’s too short.
I’m struggling to see how this is supposed to be better than craigslist, where at least you got to categorize your listing into “car parts” so people knew what they were looking for.
In my experience, 98% of users on Facebook never read the listing description, and most of those misinterpret the listing title even when it is in plain clear and correct grammar. My other beef is that probably 75% reply with just a lowball offer if they ever do get back to you.
Here in Ontario, Canada, I find Craigslist to be a waste of time. We have Kijiji, and eBay owned free online classified system, but it’s not much better than Facebook Marketplace.
The problem is not truly the medium, it’s the high percentage of idiots and jerks.
“ We have Kijiji, and eBay owned free online classified system”
Actually Kijiji is now owned by a company called Adevinta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijiji
https://www.adevinta.com/our-brands
I can see most of the responders really thinking it was the entire car for sale, and few of them actually being scammers. Not many average Americans know car terminology. Even in the car world, “hardtop” can often mean the whole car (see the old cars minus B-pillars called hardtops). I agree with those that say post the hardtop off the car, and the doors off the car. Or photoshop the car faded out of the photo or circle and label the part in red.
I have much fun “overbidding” the lowballers, so if they offer me 200 under the asking price, I “offer” them 200 OVER the asking price. Usually gets them to buzz right off 😀
That’s my MO as well. Usually ends the conversation right there although I get some people that complain that my price is higher than what it says in the ad. I think they don’t even understand what I am doing.
When selling my mom’s low mileage Yaris last year, when I got a low-baller offering $2500 (my asking was $8000… which was based off of other Yarii asking prices), I sent him a link for a Yaris with a $2500 asking price… and wished him luck.
Of course it had a bazillion km on it and it was in much worse condition.
The idiot didn’t like that reality check… LOL
Keep the hardtop and doors for future winter adventures in the West.
This really seems like the best option.
Two things:
People don’t read but they’ll look at pictures. You’re going to have to remove the doors and top and post photos of them alone and not on the keep.
Second, LA is a multicultural city and you may be running into language issues.
Yep, came down here to point out that most of the ones he described as infuriating clearly don’t speak nglish. They saw a picture and are acting on it.
That’s how you know they’re not scammers. The scammers do speak english. Their livelihood depends on it.
“Yep”? Should be “Yup”.
“clearly don’t speak nglish”?
I can tell this comment is a scam.
When I still used Facebook it had a translator option. Is that gone?
FB’s translator is mostly crap but I’ve only ever seen it used for posts and comments not for communication.
It’s funny, my boss is from Mexico and we were talking about this the other day, and he was saying that people should have to learn English in the US, and I was arguing that there isn’t a national language here. And also, that where we are was Mexico before it was the US anyway.
That’s like saying we should be forced to accept pesos. Or since it belonged to the natives before the Spanish, we should accept acorns as payment.
BTW, I do speak Spanish. If you make an attempt to speak my native language, I’ll attempt to speak yours. Otherwise, I just pretend not to speak Spanish at all for those too ignorant to learn.
I feel your pain! I detest using flawed selling platforms and somehow they all turn to shit in time.But yes,FB markets reaches new lows with it’s features.
It’s actually fun to game the system from the other side. I reply using my own words ,not the dumb auto response, and always include my phone number with a polite invite to call if they prefer.
So far i’ve got two great deals on cars with that approach. The sellers are so grateful to deal with a serious buyer,they’re happy to jump through some hoops.
Coincidentally i bought a car like this late last night.The seller got 40 responses,mostly stupid offers, so when i asked if i could come see it (at night remember) he knew i was serious.
Sadly I’ll have to sell something soon and so run the FB market gauntlet again.I have a game plan but there’s no getting around that auto reply feature.
I guess i’ll have a short polite phrase ready to copy and paste…
I’ve also had great luck buying stuff on FB this way. It’s amazing what you can achieve when a seller knows you’re legit and almost serious.
I’ve had similar experiences on OfferUp etc.
Had a Mazda that would overheat, almost instantly unless it was going uphill, that I was done dealing with.
I explained everything about it in the post. Everything!
Even started the post with “Drives, but overheats. Will need to be towed.”
The amount of imbecile I had to deal with in response to that post eventually lead to me trading it to a sketchy friend of a friend for a bag of mushrooms.
Which was well below the asking price I had fairly set.
You could’ve easily sold the wheels, bought steelies and new tires for it and still come out ahead on the deal.
Why are you responding to something you didn’t even bother to read? Seriously. Why?
Due to the shitbrained responses and questions (which I had already answered before they asked (read the post!)) I honestly thought that maybe there was some sort of mastermind behind it all.
Some large, tentacled, car hoarding being with too much free time, but strapped for cash, that assaults you with a squid like ink of asinine until you lower the price to “please just take it I don’t even care anymore” levels.
Beware the Craigslist Kraken.
I believe it exists. I have yet to find a more reasonable explanation for this nonsense.
I can pantomime my way through a conversation with a human that speaks a different language than me and we will both be able to understand each other in the end.
There is something inhuman going on here.
And it pre-dates AI and Bots. (Craigslist is old.)
Alien hoarders makes more sense than anything reality based I can come up with.
Alien hoarders with no money.
Seriously. What else could manage such terrible spelling, misunderstanding and grammar in the age of autocorrect than beings from beyond our solar system?
The Craigslist Kraken are real.
I recently sold a nice pair of steel toe Danner boots to one. It looked human, even shook hands like one. But it asked what the steel toe was for, after meeting up with me and paying for the boots. That’s not human behavior. It’s something else.
The truth is out there.
Release the Kraken!
Darn tootin, second round game 7 here we come!
The ballsiest FB Marketplace thing I’ve seen is cars I had been keeping an eye on (mostly if I had time to see them) go away, and then come back with new sellers, at a higher price, on temp plates. One even used the original dealership pictures. I assume Yael does similar, and just lowballs everyone on everything, and if you’d bit, you’d see your hardtop for sale again in a week.
We’ve got Kijiji up in Canada, since it’s eBay owned, I’m surprised it hasn’t migrated down to the US.
Kijiji is owned by Ebay. So is Gumtree. Also every restaurant is Taco Bell.
Actually Kijiji is now owned by a company called Adevinta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijiji
https://www.adevinta.com/our-brands
I used to sell very successfully on Craigslist years back but now no one is using it except for complete vehicles or housing, since other sites scan Craigslist for that stuff. But individual items, forget about it. I had six items up for a month on Craigslist and zero responses other than two scammers. When I put those ads on Marketplace I got immediate responses and was able to sell some items.
Here is how I determine which ones are the scammers, when they send you the message right under their name it will say when they joined Facebook, if says created in 2023 then most likely a scammer, but to make sure, click on Buyer details -> View profile and see if they have anything posted. All the scammers I have seen so far are newly created profiles using someone else’s profile pic with nothing posted.
My most recent Facebook marketplace sale was an old Craftsman rolling cart. Responses started out slow, and then sure enough, right when I want to sit down and just watch TV for the night, bing bing bing. Virtually none of them legit. I typically leave the auto responses unread. If I see them asking an actual question, I will do my best to reply to them as quickly as possible. After twenty different inquiries, maybe four of which were legitimate, I did get it sold. It’s not the greatest of platforms, but I’ve managed to sell almost everything I’ve listed there.
I have a solution for this. I end every listing with something to the effect of “Please start any response to this ad with the phrase ‘[pair of nonsensical words]’ or I will summarily delete your message without response or delay.” It shows you immediately that some bot or bot-level human intelligence couldn’t be bothered to read your ad, and thus isn’t worth the effort of entertaining longer than it takes to hit ‘delete’.
I’ve been trying to sell a camper on Marketplace for over a month now, I’ve had over 100 “is it still availables”, 3 people schedule times to look at it, then flake out and not show up, 1 person wanting me to finance it, 1 person wanting to trade a bigger camper for it, and 1 person wanting to trade a Chevy S10 + $1500 for it. In other words, zero people who will just show up, give me money, sign the paperwork, and drive away
RVTrader if you really want it gone. I bought my camper on there and it was a great experience.
I tried, my manufacturer isn’t in their list, so it wouldn’t let me make an ad
Contact support for RVTrader and cash them to add the manufacturer of your camper to their list. That should be two minutes work if they want a listing. GLWTS!
Will give it another shot, might have just been having a simple browser compatibility issue with their menus, too
This is easy to deal with. I put in the first line of the ad is “will not respond to is this still available” If you get “is this still available” delete the message. A serious buyer always comes along.
definitely 2nd this approach
Counter point:
Is it still available?
Nope, I sold it three days ago but I left the ad up because I so enjoyed the delightful experience of a dozen of you asking me the same question every day.
Marketplace has the worst possible search function. There isn’t a single filter or setting that does ONLY the thing it claims to. I absolutely hate using it for finding anything. FB just treats it like another feed, but there’s money attached to this one.
100% FBMP is garbage incarnate. On top of that, if you have multiple searches going, the search settings jump between tabs. Say I’m trying to find a car anywhere in the southwest, and something else I’m not willing to fly for. Gotta pick one search radius, because whichever was set last is the same for every search. HATE Facebook and everything about it.
Yeah, the search function infuriates me to no end. I can find something, go back and look for it later, say a “”Fiat 124 Spider”, even if I search on the exact name as it is written in the listing, it may not show up in the 2nd search, but poke around enough and I will still find it for sale. At least craigslist will return what you search on logically and consistently.
The flux and unpredictability of the searches drives me absolutely bonkers. Why is it like that? It’s like search roulette and it has made me stop looking there, except for the occasional cheapo used furniture.
So true! It’s crazy how bad it is. Maybe they try to repurpose whatever algorithms fill my feed with random garbage?
Funny though: I bought a motorcycle I wasn’t (initially) looking for 3 hours from home because the one I WAS interested in 5 miles from my home wouldn’t reliably show up in searches until I broadened the area.
My experience suggests that most responses to my online for sale ads are foreigners being paid pennies to collect account data.
Every time I try to sell something online, the amount of spams, scams and trolls I get rises noticeably.
It’s becoming mandatory to have multiple accounts on every platform out there. I even recently got an entirely separate second cell phone and number to try to isolate all this shit. I already have six different email accounts. It’s getting difficult to keep track.
Unlimited free communication is extremely expensive once the desperate and selfish start taking advantage of it.