Is Kijiji Still a Free Classifieds
Dear Kijiji Autos Dealer,
We are writing you today to let you know that starting in March, we will now charge a small listing fee for each car posted by a dealer on Kijiji. We decided to charge this per car fee to reduce the amount of low quality cars listed on Kijiji, and to allow us to invest in further improvements for both car dealers and car buyers. You will be able to pay this listing fee by credit card (Visa, MasterCard) or PayPal when you list a car for sale.
Kijiji Autos
www.kijiji.ca
This is a fraction of the email send by kijiji to all the dealers across Canada, regarding the new fees applied to new and used car dealers. But… Wait a minute. How do you expect to improve the quality of the cars listed by dealers by charging them this” small fee”. I thought it was Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry and The Ontario Ministry of Transportation, issued to deal with the quality of the cars sold by dealers, and decide which is “a low or high-quality vehicle” .
For those who don’t know, Kijiji started as a free classifieds website by Ebay, back in 2004, and it claims today to be the biggest classifieds website in Canada. Well…. it might be what they claim, but with a big difference Kijiji it is not free anymore for most of services they offer. Here are some tricky profits that Kijiji is making which I think you should know before using it:
“Urgent sale” or Let others know you want to sell quick. 15.99$ for 7 days only.
This is the newest fee they have in their website, but most of the people don’t understand what this is all about. It doesn’t make sense to me because, practically, I don’t know any seller that doesn’t wish to sale his items “urgently”. But the worst part is the large number of emails and phone calls you get from curbsiders, tire kickers and Nigerian Scammers from all over the world, asking you to sell your car up to 80% less.
“Bump Up” Bump your Ad back up to top of the first page. Ads on the first page get noticed more often. 1.99$
It takes less time to re post your add on the first page by simply copy pasting it, than filling up all your credit card information and spending 2 bucks.
“TOP ADD” Reach more people by having your Ad in the top section of its category for a week. 33.99$
The top add used to work fine in the past when there were only 5-20 top adds posts, but because of the high number of posts on the top adds section, you get to pay the money and still see your add on the 5th-6th, sometimes even 10th page.
Homepage gallery. Have your Ad be seen on the Kijiji homepage by thousands of people every day for a week. $68.75
This one is the same as “TOP ADD”,and looked just fine in the past, when only couple of adds were displayed in the “GALLERY SECTIONS”, but now there are too many,approximately 160 adds, that makes it hard for you to receive feedback from the customers.
Link your website 4,99$, and highlight your add (these are two other free services that Kijiji offers, that I am willing to write about some other times).
Having said all this, and based on the recent charges put on dealers, I have a strong feeling, that this local classifieds, is soon going to loose business, because all good cars today in ontario bear the seal of dealers .And the evidence will be soon clear, since those interested to buy a car won’t shop at this classifieds, because they will know in no time that dealers are not interested to advertise their vehicles at Kijiji any longer.
On the other hand, good news come from autotrader.ca, a classic and popular automarket website in North America. They have already reduced their prices up to 50%, from march 2010 for all car dealers in Canada. Is that a coincidence, or a market strategy!!!! I’m just assuming, because it is still early to speak about it. However, this is certainly not a good news for Kijiji.
Below is full email send by Kijiji to all dealers across Canada and the snapshot of vehicles listed for sale at 02/03/20010.
Comments (17)
Private sellers restricted to no more than 2 car ads at one time. What about that?
I’m not using anymore kijiji because of hight number of nigerian scam.
I strongly agree with your article. I used Kijiji for staff’s selection of my company, I really amazed by the bad results.
I love kijiji but honestly they have to many fees, the site was so clean and easy to navigate before but now is kinda mess.
Such nasty people, so why do some people feel the need to do this?
I’ve been looking for a website exactly like this for a long time. Thank you for taking the time to produce this…never easy when you have so much to do.
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You know, I have to tell you, I truly savor this blog and the useful insight. I find it to be energizing and quite instructive. I wish there were more blogs like it. Anyway, I felt it was about time I posted a comment on Kijiji Free Classifieds | Car Instructions – I just wanna tell you that you did a good job on this. Cheers mate!
Another interesting article from your blog 🙂 When will it stop….hopefully never
Hrmm that was strange, my comment got swallowed. Anywho I wanted to express it’s nice to learn that someone else also discussed this as I’d difficulties finding the similar information in other places. This was the very first place which helped me understand why. Appreciate it.
I represent a classifieds site in central Florida that offers mostly free listings, and I’m curious about the responses here. Obviously free is good, but it’s better to be effective.
What do the auto dealers here think is reasonable price per vehicle if the ad is effective, easy to manage, and not overwhelmed by scammers?
I think 5-8 $ is a reasonable price of course if they change the website features.
Ill never spend a dime to them, it is ridiculous 12$ for a add that in 30 min goes in page 30. Its an excuse by Kijiji to cash in… that is it.
Hiya, do you have a Twitter page that I may follow? Thank you
I Agree kijij has made a greedy mess of the site. I’m using other sites like Aderk to post & browse anything I have for sale now!! Or Used.com
Kijiji is an American company that belongs to Ebay. And Ebay is not about FREE . It is about PROFITS. They are sueing Craiglist for offering the service free.
Anyways,I posted an apt for rent a week before the end of the month.12 days later and still couldnt rent it.Of course,I was receiving hudreds of scam emails and jokers every day.
I posted it on eclassifieds and rented it the same day. I tried nortad.com the followin month for another home and rented it in 2 days. All free and not even a single scam or unserious query.
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