Craigslist Rant!

[zapdafish]

he probably got swamped with emails within minutes and stopped responding once it was sold.  Hours is way to long for sonething like this. I got my kapex off of craiglist form $350 and by no more than 30 secs before the next guy got there trying to buy it

 

[sheeschen]

Another tip if you see a good deal is to offer a little more than they're asking for - if you expect an ad to get swamped with responses, it's one way to make yours stand out.  A friend sold his mountain bike at, in hindsight, too low a price and got about 30 responses.  One guy offered $5 more than the asking price.  Guess who got it?

Of course, there are scams out there with folks offering more than the asking price, being out of the country, and mailing you a check and blah blah blah, so you need to make sure you've got a flexible schedule and let the seller know you can meet them at their earliest convenience with cash.

 

[NuggyBuggy]

I used to be peeved when I didn't get a response for stuff I was selling, until I actually started selling stuff myself. If you're selling something desirable for a good price, you will be inundated with responses.  With buyers the way they are - saying they'll buy and then not showing up, etc, it can be hard to send everyone a "sold, pending payment" email.  If you use gmail like I do, which gives you one way to view your messages (newest first), simply replying to the craigslist-generated reply gives the other party your email address - and if they respond to your message then it becomes a major PITA to figure out who replied to you first.  So if you believe in trying to sell to the people who emailed you first, then it's actually better to not reply to anyone except the person you're dealing with right then, so as to maintain the integrity of the reply timeline.

On another note, if you ever get inundated with responses, you know you're asking too little.  A fair price should always come with one or two lowball offers ;-).