Cheap Used Car

Tips for selling your car online

I’m a software developer based in the UK and a lot of my work over the last few years involves Car Dealers buying cars over the internet, so when it came to the time I wanted to sell my car I had a lot of insider knowledge that helped me get the best price for the my car.

Before I start its probably worth saying that unless you’re selling the car privately you’re only going to get the trade value for your car. All the dealers work from price guides published by CAP or Glasses Guide and while the prices in these guides may vary it is not by much and no dealer will give you much more than what your car listed as worth in these guides – they simply could not sell it on for any more!

You should also know that these price guides are updated on the first of every month and normally used cars devalue over time so if you wait you will probably get a few hundred pounds less for it. Also, because of this, car buyers will only honour an offer for a limited time period.

When it came to selling my car I had an unusual advantage over most as I actually knew the trade value of the car before I decided to sell it. However its not hard to get a rough idea of what you’re car is worth and after getting a few offers for your car from the trade you only need to calculate the average amount offered and, while it will still be less than the trade value, it won’t be far off.

So you’re first job is to get online and start getting offers for your car. You can make life easier for yourself by opening up notepad and storing answers to fields requested often (such as the registration, mileage, your contact details, etc…). Google is the best place to go to get a list of car buyers on the internet. Search for sell my car, buy my car and/or value my car and Google will return a list of all the online buyers for your region. You should treat the search results as a list to be worked through, go to each site on the first 3 pages and submit your car for valuation. It may take you a while to get post your details through each of these sites but by the time you’ve finished you’ll have plenty of offers for your car.

Once you have a good number of offers for your car you need to decide if you’re going to sell your car to one of them or look elsewhere. The online sites all have different tactics for buying cars online. Some deliberately overvalue cars, hoping to knock down the offer when they see the car in real life and they do so even with cars which are in showroom condition. While other sites deliberately undervalue cars allowing them to pick up cheap cars from people desperate to sell their car and because they will follow up leads and allow the owner to haggle over the amount.

So if you want a nice easy sale you’re best bet is to sell to one of the dealers who offered you close to the average and has the best reputation as its most likely they will just collect the car and make payment. However if you’re looking to get more for your car then it may be worth haggling with some of the offers below the average. Anyone that’s offered more is either hungry for the type of car you have or is hoping to knock down the offer. It may still be worth your while contacting them but be on guard.

One final thing. If you own a mini or a prestige car then its likely that your car will be grossly undervalued by the online car buyers. Its not because any of these companies are trying it on its quite simply because the data supplied by the price guides makes it impossible to give anything close to an accurate value for your car. Mini’s are especially difficult as the option packs can add thousands to its value but unless the system valuing your car knows of installed options (which isn’t often) it cannot generate a value anything close to its true market value.

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