Buying on Craigslist

This chapter covers the ins and outs of buying on Craigslist. You could be buying for a few reasons: You want to buy items to resell, or you are trying to buy an item for yourself cheaply. In either case, this chapter will help you find what you are looking for a low price.

I've broken down the buying process into the following steps:

1.Finding the item or items you want
2.Communicating with the seller
3.Getting the price you want

1. Finding the Item You Want

If you are looking for a specific item here are a few ways to go about it. The first is simply to use Craigslist search.

How does Craigslist search work? The Craigslist search engine by default searches both the title and description of each post. This is important to know because many similar types of search engines, Ebay for example, only search the title. So you'll need to base your search habits on Craigslist off of this fact.

You can set Craigslist search to search only the titles if you want, but I recommended that you leave it how it is for now.

Is there a right way and wrong way to search? I think there is. I'll show you how to do a search which will increase your chances of finding what you are looking for

Not all Sellers are Perfect

This is the first idea you needs to wrap your wits around. Not all sellers are perfect. When you are searching for something, you might know the exact model number of the item you are looking for, but the person posting the item may not know the model number even though they are posting the exact item you are looking for. They may have included only the manufacturer or serial number in their posts and not the model number. So if you now do a search for the model number only you may not ever find the item.

On the other hand, the seller may know the exact model number of the item he is selling, but forgets to put the manufacturer. Say the item is a Compaq Presario 6000 computer and you do a search for “Compaq Presario 6000”, you will not find the item because the seller did not put the manufacturer name “Compaq” into the posting and so the Craigslist search engine will not include his posting in your results for “Compaq Presario 6000”.

Also realize that seller may misspell certain things in their descriptions. This will cause their postings to not appear in your search results if you are spelling the item correctly. Here's an example: I've seen some people on Craigslist call laptop computers “labtops”. So if I did a search for a “Macbook Laptop”, I would not see the posting because that unaware seller called it a “Macbook Labtop”. This is just something to be aware of in doing your searches.

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