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Key Takeaways While Craigslist remains one of the biggest online classifieds sites, there are many Craiglist alternatives. Morphing from an auction to a selling model, eBay functions as a classified site; it also has a classifieds section.
Due to scammers hitting Craiglist, specialized housing sites like Apartments. Facebook has become a significant classifieds community, with its Facebook Marketplace. Article Sources. Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work. These include white papers, government data, original reporting, and interviews with industry experts.
We also reference original research from other reputable publishers where appropriate. You can learn more about the standards we follow in producing accurate, unbiased content in our editorial policy. Related Articles. Lifestyle Advice eBay vs. Amazon: What's the Difference? Partner Links. Related Terms Electronic Commerce e-commerce Ecommerce is a business model that enables the buying and selling of goods and services over the Internet.
Read about ecommerce benefits and trends. Affiliate Marketing Definition Affiliate marketing allows you to earn commissions for marketing another company's products or services. In Tacoma, Wash. The woman posted an ad on craigslist that simply said "Come and take anything you want" and gave a home address. The house actually belonged to the woman's aunt, whom the woman felt deserved punishment for insulting her mother.
Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Business Profiles. How Craigslist Works. The Community and Gigs Categories. The Craigslist Network " ". The craigslist welcome page displays the different search categories and communities. Could Craigslist Kill Journalism? Craigslist Financials " ". Selling Out is a Joke.
Craigslist Controversy One of the biggest challenges for the craigslist community is weeding out scam artists. Revenge Through Classifieds. May 6, Craigslist Nanny Ad Results in Murder. October 29, October 26, October 20, October 10, October 30, DTL Hanley, Matt. September 8, May 17, October 17, He looked around and began finding things to do. He wrote forum software to give users a chance to interact.
When he realized that every post had to be reviewed and published by hand, he created the automated process that allowed craigslist to grow. He coded a search engine. A year after he arrived he was CEO. There was no competition for the job, no ritual transfer of power, and no instructions. The only topic he can remember their disagreeing about is the peace sign that adorns the craigslist Web address. The long-running tech-industry war between engineers and marketers has been ended at craigslist by the simple expedient of having no marketers.
Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings. The staff communicates by email and IM. This is a nice environment for employees of a certain temperament. The purity of this culture is its most tenaciously guarded asset. A few years ago, Phillip Knowlton, a Bay Area psychologist who was on the craigslist staff in the site's early years, sold his 28 percent stake in the company to eBay.
Buckmaster and Newmark approved eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, himself a programmer, as the representative of eBay on the craigslist board. But at that point, Omidyar no longer ran eBay, and he was replaced by an eBay vice president who had overseen the acquisition of a craigslist competitor in Europe.
When eBay launched a competing service in the US, Buckmaster responded by reorganizing craigslist and weakening eBay's influence. The companies have since sued each other.
While the dueling complaints hinge on questions of stock dilution and conflict of interest, it is hard to imagine any conventional business executive being satisfied with the way craigslist operates. What kind of company declares itself uninterested in maximizing profit? Best and Buckmaster lived together as a couple for five years.
Though they are now separated, they remain friends, and she continues to serve as a kind of translation mechanism by which the hints and silences of craigslist management are converted into responses suitable for the press. Queries, in recent months, have concerned mostly sex and violence. That the world would expect craigslist to take responsibility for the rare violent criminal who lures victims through an ad strikes Buckmaster as absurd.
He points to the thousands of people who die every year in auto accidents. How can you sleep at night? Don't you realize that a person is dead?
Buckmaster's dispassionate protest reflects his cast of mind. Emotional appeals are more likely to provoke his skepticism than his sympathy, and when the complaints come from aspiring Internet entrepreneurs he is especially prone to sarcasm.
He hears many such complaints, because one of the most curious things about craigslist is that a company designed and run entirely by programmers is so hostile to outsiders who want to pull neat technical tricks to improve the site. A few years ago, independent programmer Jeff Atwood created a service that would allow people to search multiple cities at once or even search craigslist globally.
Buckmaster arranged some technical interference to kill it off. Another programmer named Ryan Sit created a service called Listpic, which scraped images from craigslist and dumped them into an interface for browsing: You could scan through all the photos from the apartment listings or see pictures of all the dogs up for adoption.
Buckmaster banished Listpic, too. He had specific objections to both. Listpic ran ads, it put a high burden on craigslist servers, and when he looked at traffic records he noticed that Listpic was being used mainly to enhance enjoyment of the sexy images people posted in their erotic-services ads. Universal search subverts craigslist's mission to enable local, face-to-face transactions; it increases the risk of scams and can be exploited to snatch up bargains, giving technically sophisticated users an advantage over casual browsers.
But the very surfeit of these practical objections—many of which probably have technical solutions—hints that the real explanation lies elsewhere, and with a minimum of pressure Buckmaster will state it plainly. It is the same reason that craigslist has never done any of the things that would win approval among Web entrepreneurs, the same reason he has never updated its era Web design.
The reason is that craigslist's users are not asking for such changes. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader.
It could be we're doing one or two things right. This ends the debate for him, but his tone is oddly non-triumphal; in fact, Buckmaster's statement of fealty to users has a weary sound that I don't understand until weeks later.
Only after I have spent every spare hour on craigslist—browsing the ads, tracking the spam, reading the help forums, contacting users—do I finally begin to grasp something of his situation. The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong.
They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don't work as well as they'd like. By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist's programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public.
Here's the lesson: The public is a motherfucker. Craig Newmark says that craigslist works because people are good, and he has stuck to this point of view without wavering. Whether you accept it as true will depend on your standard of goodness. Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam.
Con artists prowl the listings, paying sellers with fake cashier's checks and luring buyers to share their credit card numbers. Other evils are more subtle. Business owners whose judgment is distorted by self-interest fail to understand the rules and put the same item in multiple categories or repost it many times a day to insure it stays prominent, crowding out other sellers.
A woman listing a car forgets to tell buyers about problems with the title until they've made a long trip out to see it. I used it to sell everything from a blender to gardening tools and some scuba fins. I even bartered a few old camping tents my roommate left behind for two cases of White Claw. Facebook introduced Marketplace in to little fanfare. At the time, the feature seemed like yet another lackluster effort by Facebook to clone someone else's app.
Facebook was the latest in a long line of apps to try and pitch itself as a Craigslist killer. Many had tried, but none had been able to unseat the minimalist website when it came to buying and selling used goods.
But, unlike other wannabe Craigslist killers, Facebook Marketplace has endured and improved over the years. These days, it's the app I use most when I need to sell stuff. Facebook Marketplace has several advantages that make it easier, faster and more trustworthy than Craigslist. It's quick and easy to list an item on Marketplace, since it's built right into Facebook's website and mobile app.
You simply snap a photo, upload it and type out the name of your item. The app will use that data to guess what type of item it is, saving time when it comes to categorizing it. After that, you list the condition of the product. You can write out a short description if you'd like. Often, listing an item can be done from your phone within 5 minutes.
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