You need to sell your car but you don’t want the PX value the dealership is giving you. Well the only other route is to sell privately.
Daunting to some but we’ve wrote a killer article on how to sell your car privately and top tips on writing that car advert.
So you’ve written your advert and you have a folder full of pictures, you need to get that in front of perspective buyers. If it’s not advertised, you’re not going to sell it.
Now, we are going to speak about the UK market, but may cover others in coming blog posts.
There are a plethora of places to sell your car as we have mentioned in previous articles on where to buy from, it usually goes both ways.
They are not all as effective as each other and they all have a different market share, there is a lot of cross-over, but for example you wouldn’t typically sell a £250 car on Auto Trader as opposed to Gumtree or eBay. One reason is audience, but the main reason is price to advertise.
Below is a list of the prices for all the top platforms as of today (26th February 2020). We may update these in the future, so this post maybe old but hopefully the prices will be up to date.
| Platform | Duration | Price |
| Auto Trader | 2 weeks | £36.95 |
| 3 weeks | £46.95 | |
| 6 weeks | £58.95 | |
| Until sold | £74.95 | |
| eBay* | 30 days | £17.99 |
| Gumtree | 30 days | Free |
| Piston Heads | 30 days | £11.99 |
| Facebook Marketplace | Forever | Free |
| Forums | Forever | Free** |
*There are more options, but we advise this route
**Some may charge
Above is a clear table of the pricing, there are other routes you can go down such as swap and eBay auctions, but we will focus on the above.
Now, it might be tempting to just go for the cheapest, but each platform has a speciality, summarised below.
Auto Trader:
Has the biggest market share, you will get many eyes on your advert from all walks. This really is the go-to for selling a car. But if you have a very cheap car that offers something to the masses or you have a unique car, then you may save some money going elsewhere.
eBay:
Becoming the go-to for all cars now. It used to take the low end-audience share, but there are plenty of people discovering eBay for higher end cars. We’d tend to use this first and if you fail to sell, then fall-back to Auto Trader.
Gumtree:
It’s free, but you get a lot of messers and people generally don’t look here for cars unless they are looking for a local bargain. You may as well try though. Don’t be tempted to bump your car up the listings for a premium. I’m sure there are stats behind it being positive, but Gumtree is orientated around distance from home, so regardless of when it was listed, it’ll probably show on someones search.
Piston Heads:
Not a huge market share, but probably the largest for specialist car sales. If you have a specialist car, you’ll root out all the messers by listing on Piston Heads.
Facebook Marketplace:
Again, it’s free, so you might as well, but covers the same market as Gumtree.
Forums:
Like Piston Heads, this is specialist, you can list your BMW on an Audi forum and still sell it, but it’s usually specialist, mostly free, but a lot of forums charge, so be wary of this, you’re just a likely to sell your car elsewhere, as those looking on forums tend to look on the above too. We’d list if it’s free, but if not, we’d recommend using the above unless you have something very very unique.
We hope the above helps, and we will try and keep it up to date with the latest price changes.