After getting rolling a month or so ago trying to get some stuff sold, things seemed to be going well. I listed stuff, people bought it. Everyone was happy.
Now I'm starting to have Craigslist problems. So I gotta vent... Seems once you have more than a small handful of listings, like more than 5 or 6, they start "Ghosting" your listings. Ghosting is where everything appears to be fine except that the listing is never seen by anyone, ever. It doesn't show up in searches. It doesn't exist except on your account list of activity. You can't even find it by searching for the exact listing number.
Another issue is that there is a long list of rules about what can be in the listing and what can't. How it should read and how it shouldn't. Many points of what I am discovering are not in the Terms of Service. They are simply what the CL community apparently thinks. And if enough CL readers FLAG your listing, it will be removed. That is, if it isn't ghosted or deleted by the system first.
The frustrating part is that we are talking about listings that may have been good to go for a month or even a year but suddenly, it's not good. It's ghosted, flagged or deleted without any notice and you have no way to know what caused it. And if you try to relist it to fix the problem(s), it simply gets ghosted or deleted again.
So you go to the help forums. Oh, what a joy that is. Let's just say I felt like a kid with a nice camera and lens on the school yard and a group of forum volunteers proceeded to surround and gang up on me in about 2 min to criticize not only my poor attempt to be funny in the initial post title but belittle and criticize everything about the listing. Some of the input/feedback was helpful but in general, when I asked a question about why something was a potential problem, it was met with defensive retorts accusing me of feeling entitled, being stubborn or refusing to take the advice. In other words, hostile.
And there was a lot of "advice" on how I should write the listing, how I should not quote specs, prices, etc. If you have two listings that have similar text or titles, they could be flagged. And I should always state the AGE of say, a Lens. Unless it's NEW, then I shouldn't be listing it at all unless I list it as a dealer. And if I say for instance that a lens is SHARP, I am talking down to the reader. And if SHARP is in all caps, it will probably get flagged because that is shouting. No matter that there is no way to highlight or otherwise make text stand out at all since it is plain text with no formatting except caps. Oh, and no html, no links, no prices, no mention of eBay, etc. I think even having text in the image is a no-no. The list goes on and on. :
I even had one forum "helper" say that I was nuts if I thought someone was going to actually meet me with thousands of dollars in cash for photography equipment so I was most likely a scammer. Really??
So I'm just warning you that if you list something on CL, don't be surprised if you have trouble. Either the first day or day 43 something will go wrong and you'll likely never know what caused it. It's not the fun carefree CraigsList that it was a few years ago. Aaaargh!! :-[
Now I'm starting to have Craigslist problems. So I gotta vent... Seems once you have more than a small handful of listings, like more than 5 or 6, they start "Ghosting" your listings. Ghosting is where everything appears to be fine except that the listing is never seen by anyone, ever. It doesn't show up in searches. It doesn't exist except on your account list of activity. You can't even find it by searching for the exact listing number.
Another issue is that there is a long list of rules about what can be in the listing and what can't. How it should read and how it shouldn't. Many points of what I am discovering are not in the Terms of Service. They are simply what the CL community apparently thinks. And if enough CL readers FLAG your listing, it will be removed. That is, if it isn't ghosted or deleted by the system first.
The frustrating part is that we are talking about listings that may have been good to go for a month or even a year but suddenly, it's not good. It's ghosted, flagged or deleted without any notice and you have no way to know what caused it. And if you try to relist it to fix the problem(s), it simply gets ghosted or deleted again.
So you go to the help forums. Oh, what a joy that is. Let's just say I felt like a kid with a nice camera and lens on the school yard and a group of forum volunteers proceeded to surround and gang up on me in about 2 min to criticize not only my poor attempt to be funny in the initial post title but belittle and criticize everything about the listing. Some of the input/feedback was helpful but in general, when I asked a question about why something was a potential problem, it was met with defensive retorts accusing me of feeling entitled, being stubborn or refusing to take the advice. In other words, hostile.
And there was a lot of "advice" on how I should write the listing, how I should not quote specs, prices, etc. If you have two listings that have similar text or titles, they could be flagged. And I should always state the AGE of say, a Lens. Unless it's NEW, then I shouldn't be listing it at all unless I list it as a dealer. And if I say for instance that a lens is SHARP, I am talking down to the reader. And if SHARP is in all caps, it will probably get flagged because that is shouting. No matter that there is no way to highlight or otherwise make text stand out at all since it is plain text with no formatting except caps. Oh, and no html, no links, no prices, no mention of eBay, etc. I think even having text in the image is a no-no. The list goes on and on. :
I even had one forum "helper" say that I was nuts if I thought someone was going to actually meet me with thousands of dollars in cash for photography equipment so I was most likely a scammer. Really??
So I'm just warning you that if you list something on CL, don't be surprised if you have trouble. Either the first day or day 43 something will go wrong and you'll likely never know what caused it. It's not the fun carefree CraigsList that it was a few years ago. Aaaargh!! :-[