| 1. |
Getting started |
| 2. |
Features and Extra Items |
| 3. |
Short Comments, Long Comments |
| 4. |
Contact details |
| 5. |
Price |
| 6. |
Lifestyle category |
| 7. |
Photos |
| 8. |
Finishing your advertisement |
| 9. |
Editing your advertisement |
| 10. |
Finding your advertisement |
| 11. |
Maximising enquiries |
| 12. |
Getting help |
| 13. |
Virus or scam alert |
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Welcome to carsales.com.au's private listings. This page is intended to help you get the most from our service. Of course, you can simply enter the data on your car in the fields as they are presented, then sit back and let the system do the work for you, but there are ways of squeezing that little bit more from your advertisement and thereby increasing the number of genuine enquiries you receive while speeding up the whole sale process.
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| 1. |
Getting started |
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Once you select your vehicle make, model and year, our system will automatically fill in many of the fields for your ad, basing your equipment level on the standard ex-factory equipment list. Try to be as accurate as possible when completing optional parts of the form. This will give prospective buyers a clearer idea of what you're offering and save both you and them from wasting time - and emotional energy!
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| 2. |
Features and Extra Items |
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As already explained, our system will automatically insert in the Features field all those items fitted to your make and model of car when it leaves the factory in standard form. But check the list: sometimes things get left off, or added on which may not be relevant. Here's how to do it:
- Click on any item in the Features box that you want removed. It will automatically be moved across into the Extra Items box. Once you are satisfied there is nothing in the list that doesn't belong, you can start adding missing items as follows...
- Click on any item in the Extra Items box that should be included with the description of your car. You will see these items automatically switched across to the Features box. Only items in the Features box will be displayed in the finished ad.
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| 3. |
Short Comments, Long Comments |
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You will be asked to provide two descriptions of your car in freeform text fields. The first is for 'short comments' which will appear in the search results, while the second allows you to provide a more comprehensive 'long comments' that will only appear when a prospective buyers calls up the full advertisement.
- Short Comments: Up to 100 characters (about 20 words). Put down the most important details, such as the fact the car is in excellent condition, just serviced, full service history, non-genuine extras and so on.
- Long comments: Up to 2000 characters (around 400 words). There is space here to give a truly detailed description of your car, but again, start by providing the most important information - information most likely to influence the purchase decision.
In both cases, you have plenty of room, so try not to use newspaper-like abbreviations. Remember, a key reason buyers like using the internet is because they don't have to wadethrough meaningless or difficult to decipher abbreviations!
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| 4. |
Contact details |
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When filling in your contact details, remember this simple rule, as used by the professionals: you may only get one chance to make the sale. That means the more difficult it is for a customer to contact you, the less likely they'll keep trying, so give them as many contact number as you feel comfortable with.
- Phone numbers: Put yourself in the position of thebuyer. Don't give them a contact number that will be answered by someone who has no idea about the ad. On the other hand, if you usually have your mobile phone with you - perfect!
- Email: We won't publish your email address because it's too easy to get 'spammed' if we publish it. However, you will have provided us with your email address so we can contact you. As a result, we accept email enquiries from interested parties and pass them to you, but please note that we reserve the right to eliminate most emails that in our opinion:
- might be unsolicited junk mail
- might be offensive or fraudulent in nature and or
- might breach the terms and conditions of use of this site or
- otherwise are - in our sole discretion - not in the interests of carsales.com.au Ltd
We suggest that you check your email regularly and respond to the person enquiring as promptly as possible. Any delay lowers the likelihood they will remain interested in your car.
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| 5. |
Price |
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You know how much you want from your car, but do you know how realistic that price really is? Put an ad on the site with the wrong price and you'll either be inundated with calls because people can't believe the bargain (and you'll miss out on the price you should have obtained) or you won't get a single call and you'll probably get mad with us! But help is a click away.
- Use the Check Price with Redbook button to automatically find out what range of prices the industry as a whole uses as a guideline.
- Run a search through our website for cars matching yours and see what everyone else is asking.
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| 6. |
Lifestyle category |
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Your car will already be in a pre-set, standardised category designed to make it as easy as possible for customers to find, but you also have the opportunity to nominate up to two other lifestyle categories that suit your car. For example, you might nominate your car as a coupe and as a sport car. But select the category honestly: remember, you want to put the car where the maximum number of people will expect to find it. There's not much point putting a small utility vehicle in the sport car category no matter how sporty you think it is because the thousands of people hunting through these adsevery day will be looking somewhere else!
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| 7. |
Photos |
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This may very well be the single most important thing you can do to increase your chances of success. The professional car dealers who use our website have found that ads with just one photo of the specific car are almost 20 times more likely to get interest from a buyer than ads with no photos! It makes sense: as a buyer wouldn't you want to see a photo before investing more time in following up? So if you have a digital camera, use it. If not, consider getting access to one through a friend or visiting one of our carsales photoshops. A carsales photoshop is probably located fairly close to you (see our location guide) and will be operated by a professional whose other duties include taking all the photos for that dealership's web presence on carsales. If you're doing it yourself, here are a few tips for a better shot:
- Photograph your car in even light. Sunlight will create glare and imprenetrable shadows, but a fairly bright overcast day will give excellent results.
- Shoot the car from a ¾ angle, preferably the front right or left. This way people can see what the car really looks like. Also, shooting from adult eye height can enhance the look of the car. Don't use wide angle lenses though, they can make the car look truly odd!
- Don't bother shooting on the highest quality with a megapixel camera. You only need a shot that's 550 X 400 pixels and around 40 kilobytes. We're going to compress your photo to this size anyway, so the quality will be better if you start from here.
- You can use a scanner to scan a printed photo of your car too. These can be just as good as a digital shot, but remember to crop the pic and save it in the right size and resolution.
- Finally, we only accept two file formats: jpeg and gif. These are the formats used by digital cameras anyway, and any graphics editing package should allow you to save any graphic file in one or both of these formats.
Finally, if you want more tips on good Internet photography, click here.
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| 8. |
Finishing your advertisement |
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When you have completed all the data for your ad, click 'Next' at the bottom of the page and you will be given the opportunity to see just how both the short version and the full version of your ad will appear to anyone searching. If you're happy, continue to the next page, but remember you can go back and make changes if you're not happy.
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| 9. |
Editing your advertisement |
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At a later date, you might discover you've made an error in your ad. Don't worry, use your username and password to get access once again and change whatever needs fixing. If you didn't have a photo when you first created the ad, you can place a photo into it at any time during the ad's duration on our site, or even swap a new photo for the one you used initially. There is no limit to the number of times you can return and edit.
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| 10. |
Finding your advertisement |
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After you have created your advertisement and you have received an email confirming your ad has been approved for upload to the site, you may want to search for your vehicle.
Please note that your vehicle will be uploaded to the website within 2 hours (during business hours) after you press the finish button (Step 5) of the advertisement creation process.
The quickest and easiest way to locate your advertisement is to follow these simple search options on the carsales.com.au homepage:
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Category: |
Select Private seller cars |
| Make: |
Select the Make of your vehicle (as you did when you created your advertisement) |
| Model: |
Select the Model of your vehicle (as you did when you created your advertisement) |
| State: |
Select your State |
| Postcode: |
Enter your postcode |
| Kms: |
Using the drop down box next to the Postcode field, select 10 km, then click the search button |
Your vehicle should then be displayed. If you are unable to locate your vehicle, first ensure you have entered the correct State and Postcode in your advertisement. If all of your details are correct, check your confirmation email, locate your advertisement ID from the email and contact us.
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| 11. |
Maximising enquiries |
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Here's the really clever part: when you return to the edit page, we present you with some statistics on your ad that can be used by you to decide what changes might be useful. For example, if the statistics show that a lot of people have been looking at your car, but you're not getting enough enquiries, maybe the photo needs to be replaced with a better one, or maybe you need to adjust the asking price slightly. Don't be too eager to drop your price but on the other hand try not to be too stubborn!
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| 12. |
Getting help |
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We've tried to make our website as intuitive and simple to use as possible, and most people do find they're perfectly capable of doing everything by themselves. But there's no getting around the fact that creating and displaying a great advertisement on screen can catch some people out. But we're just an email or a phone call away. If you want help with any aspect of using our site, drop us a line: we'll be more than glad to offer our years of automotive and internet experience. Just one thing - we know the internet never sleeps, but we do! Our offices are only open for phonecalls during and a little each side of normal business hours (AEST), but we generally respond to emails within hours of seeing them.
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| 13. |
Virus or scam alert |
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Protect Your Password
carsales.com.au advises that under no circumstances should you provide your log in details to anyone in response to email or phone requests for confirmation, no matter how genuine these emails may appear. Known as "phishing", a number of these scams are currently in operation on the Internet. No member of the carsales network will ever request you to divulge your username or password.
Buyer / Seller Scams
We've been alerted to a scam which operates in the following way: An overseas buyer offers to buy your car. They will want to send you a cheque for an amount in excess of the purchase price of your car and will ask you to send the change back to them or to pay the change to a local shipping agent. There are several variations on the theme. If you get an offer like this from overseas, we recommend that you be alert to a possible scam.
Another scam operates as follows
Typically a car/bike/boat, etc will be offered for sale at a very low price. The seller will say that the item is located overseas or in a location that makes it difficult to inspect the item. The seller will ask you to send them a deposit or pay for the item before they will arrange to send it to you. If you get an offer like this, we recommend that you be alert to a possible scam.
Tips for safe buying
When negotiating with a seller, we strongly recommend you take the following precautions:
- Speak to the seller directly. Most online scams are conducted via email only. If you cannot contact the seller on the phone, please report it to us.
- Do NOT send money overseas. We strongly advise against using instant cash wire transfer services like Western Union or Moneygram to purchase a vehicle from an overseas seller.
- Carsales and its associated websites DO NOT operate any form of online payment services (such as BidPay or any escrow services) for vehicle purchase transactions. Report any offer of such a service to us immediately.
If you suspect a scam please click here to report it to carsales.com.au or click on www.scamwatch.gov.au and follow the links to report it to the relevant authorities.
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