I’ve just been through a long and exhaustive search before deciding to buy a second hand 2001 Honda Shadow Spirit with some beautiful after-market accents.
I’ve been keeping my eye on the market through the end of last season and the winter. Every week I check the usual suspects: autotrader; craigslist; kijiji, eBay, etc.
I’ve been keeping up with what asking prices have been and I’ve even gone so far as to throw out a few low ball offers to see what the price flexibility has been. At first, I started with much less focus but thanks to Kijiji I was able to narrow my search considerably.
First of all, I want to explain that Autotrader.ca has almost become useless to me. Their new search is not intuitive and most of their listings are over-priced dealer ads. Also, their new photo gallery loads slowly and with an irritating pixelated preview page. I had purchased my last bike on Autotrader but this time around I gave up after only a few visits.
Until now, I have always conducted and classified transactions via craigslist. I’ve bought and sold tickets to events and goods.
For some reason I’ve always thought that craigslist was the easiest choice and I’ve been able to accomplish whatever I wanted so I haven’t broadened my horizons.
Since I was buying without a schedule I had the time to really look in a lot more detail than ever before and what really impressed me was the forced added detail in the kijiji posts.
Kijiji allowed me to drill down into much better quality information about the bikes I was considering. I could instantly find mileage, engine displacement, manufacturer, price, etc. I could also sort and filter by each of those same values.
Craigslist only forces a poster to choose a broad category and search by term.
The one great thing about Craigslist us that it is where many people instinctively turn for their classified needs. The net result is a lot of ads for the products that you are searching for at a variety of qualities and price points.
Presumably because of the added effort to get set up, you get fewer listings on Kijiji, but generally higher quality of goods. It seems to me that attention to detail in creating a posting eliminates some of the posters who have the attitude “fuck it, there’s an easier way” and tend not to take care of their belongings as well as others.
Hands down, I am a convert to Kijiji.ca. Really, my only real gripe is that there is no connection between their .ca site and their .com site. I actually had to go back and google “Kijiji Canada” because they didn’t have an easy link from the .com site for me to follow after going direct to the site via typing in what I expected to be the address.
