I have been selling on craigslist for some time now and have to say that most of my experiences have been positive. I have had the opportunity to meet some really nice people doing it. Respectable people who show up when they say they are going to and don’t haggle that much with me. They leave happy and I am pleased to have had another transaction go smoothly. I wish that everyone on craigslist could be this way as they are a pleasure to deal with.

Unfortunately, not everyone on craigslist is a pleasure to deal with. There are negative experiences that I have encountered with selling on craigslist. Let’s start with the scammers. Most people who sell on craigslist are aware of this. These are the emails that come in usually traced back to Nigeria asking if an item is still available. They appear just minutes after you have listed an item for sale. Most of these emails are very obvious and very few can appear to be a genuine inquiry. The majority of them are sent from gmail or yahoo accounts. If you reply back to to one, you will usually receive an email saying that they are going to send you a certified check and will have the item picked up by a courier service. The one that I almost fell for was a fake PayPal payment.

Then there are the people who think just because you are selling an item on craigslist that you must be giving it away for free. They offer you almost nothing for your item and then become upset when you turn them down. If I’m going to give it away, I’ll donate an item to charity. Why would I have taken the time to post it for sale on craigslist? These are also usually the people who complain that I live to far away for them to drive to pick up the item. Ok, the next time I list an item I’ll be sure to move closer to you!

My favorites are the flaky people. These are the no call / no shows. They are the people who call you and act very interested in buying an item from you and tell you that they are coming by and then never show up. I can’t even count how many times this has happened to me. The flakes do not value your time, they just waste it!

Next are the people who call in the middle of the night or very early in the morning inquiring about an item that you have listed. I call these people meth heads as they must be on crystal meth or crack to do this. If your not a family member with an emergency, I’m not going to answer your call at 2 AM!

Lastly are worst people on craigslist, the haters. It’s a message from some miserable hater that prompted me to write this post. The haters are people who have nothing better to do than to email or call you criticizing or complaining about an item you have listed for sale. If you do not like an item I have for sale or service that I have available, then go buy it or get it from someone else. I do not want to hear from you!

I do understand with craigslist being a free service that caters to local sales, that I am going to encounter issues that I did not ever have to deal with selling on ebay. Overall, I enjoy selling on craigslist and will continue to do so as the positive experiences outweigh the bad ones! Thank you for reading my blog. This post was written to share my experiences with other sellers on craigslist. If you are a seller, I would like to hear from you about your experiences selling on craigslist.