That's it, I'm done. I'm not doing anything on Craigslist anymore. I'm sick and tired of the people that I end up getting on there.

Every single time I try to sell something on the site, I end up getting annoying, rude, disrespectful people responding to my ads. I've had at least two instances of both parties agreeing on a price, place, and time, and I get there and they never show up and I never hear from them. Nearly every other time, I've had people renegotiate the price at the meeting spot, figuring they have the advantage of being the convenient option.

Yesterday I was selling tickets to a [American] football game. I had someone very interested, but I really had to coax him into agreeing to meeting places and times. He was a ready buyer, I just couldn't get him to respond when I made suggestions. He'd take forever to respond to me, and I was under a time crunch to sell the tickets since the game is today at 1pm. Finally we agree on a time and place and I go to bed. I wake up before the meeting time to see that he had asked to move the meet back 30 minutes. I see that he asked this about 30 minutes before I woke up. I responded and said it was fine, and went to take a shower and get dressed. When I get back to my phone, this guy says "my bad, bro, I thought you sold them to someone else and I'm on my way to get some tickets. Sorry!" WTF? It literally took me 3 hours the night before to get this guy to agree to a place and time, and when I took 30 minutes to respond after an agreed meeting time, he bails.

Like I said, I'm done. Craigslist is a den of rude people.

I guess this is true for most online second-hand sales sites. We don't have Craigslist over here, but other comparable sites. I too have the same experience as you.

First it's hard to have them agree to a meet. Then, when they show up, they start haggling. I really hate that because by them you've already agreed on the price, but they start haggling nonetheless since they are there anyway. I find this extremely disrespectful and rude. The last time this happened (again) I finally had enough. I just said "no" and turned around. They guy then showed me a list of other sellers of similar stuff, saying there where enough others like me (how's that for respect?). I wished him the best of luck trying to pressure the others and asked him if it was worth his gas money and his time just to haggle a few euros from the price. He then very reluctantly agreed and paid the agreed upon price. I should have been happy with that I guess, but instead I was really disgusted.

I've had people calling me names because I didn't respond to them within the hour. I've had people texting me threatning texts (I used to provide my cell phone number with the ads - no more), I've had people actually ordering me around ("send me photos of the item NOW" - just like that but usually with some spelling mistakes), if had a lot of people not bothering showing up upon the agreed spot etc...

So since then, when I'm selling something and I get a response, I try really hard to 'read' what person it is before agreeing on a sale. I try googling his name, looking for user feedback about the person, checking the grammar of the mail -no blatant spelling mistakes etc...
This way I've been able to weed out the most rude and disrespectful people. I hardly get burned by those any more now. If I'm not sure about a person, I don't sell to him. I know this might mean that occasionally I'm wrong about a person, but that still beats the frustration of having to go trough the whole process of haggling and rudeness if I ended up being right.

It's the same with Craigslist and Kijiji here in Canada as well. It's nothing to do with the site and everything to do with the people. And it's not specifically/only the people that frequent those sites, because in my opinion, they're a representation of society as a whole. There are simply a large portion of untrustworthy and flaky people out there.

When I sell on Kijiji, which is very infrequently and only 3 times successfully, I handle everything by email until the last minute and I will not go out of my way to meet someone for a sale. If I'm going to be somewhere they're more than welcome to come by and meet. Otherwise they can come by the house.

I always expect that someone is going to show up and try to renegotiate. And I'm always prepared to just walk away from the deal because I won't come down a penny from the agreed price. Luckily with those 3 successful sales the buyers were stand-up people and didn't try any BS. The last one was a pair of skis I sold back in February and the buyer came way out of his way to meet me in downtown Toronto while I was at the auto show. At the same time I was trying to sell another pair of skis and received a lot of feedback/inquiries about them, but never a sale.

I'll be trying again with that same pair next week, along with a set of BBS rims and performance tires for BMW and a set of winter tires w/steel wheels for a Civic. Fingers crossed.

Hmm, I have slightly more faith in humanity than I did when I wrote my post. The buyer called me right after I started this thread and said they felt bad about the whole thing and offered to buy the tickets and he'd try to sell them at the gate.

On the one hand, I find that pretty impressive. On the other hand, I wonder if his plan all along was to get my tickets (which are extremely good - 6th row of the endzone), and sell them to make some money. If that's the case then the joke is on him. The temps dropped severely last night and rain threatened all day long. Additionally, Washington hosted its first playoff baseball game since 1933 this afternoon. Consequently the football stadium appeared about 2/3rds full on TV - if that. I'm guessing he was saddled with those tickets.


I still feel the same way in general about Craigslist, though. However, I will say that it's still good for one single thing: giving stuff away for free. The same cheap people are extremely useful when you have something of no value to you that would actually cost you something to have removed. You can post pretty much any crap on Craigslist, call it FREE, and you'll have a dozen emails in minutes.

For something like tickets I can see not expecting to negotiate when you meet but for physical things I can see them wanting to change the price after actually seeing it.

People don't always give good descriptions or pictures so you can't tell what something really is like until you see it.

I have purchased several things on craigslist and I agree it takes a while to get meeting places figured out but I just figure not everyone is as connected as we are. I know people that don't even check email once a day

That's an excellent point and I agree, but the same people who haggle on the spot for something like tickets then feel like they have even more ammo, and will try to claim this and that about the condition of an item. It makes the bad people worse, basically.


That's true too, but sometimes it's just because the person is lazy. For example, if you were trying to arrange for the purchase of tickets for a game the next day, wouldn't you be checking more often? If the buyer had wanted me to text him, I would have been happy to do so if that was more convenient for him. If it's just a product purchase arrangement, I can understand the lack of a sense of urgency, as irritating as it is

My last residence was directly across the street from the end of the subway line in Virginia. The best part of that location when it came to Craigslist was that I could simply step out the front door and in 90 seconds I'd be in a perfect public meeting spot for a Craigslist deal. This somewhat made up for the times that the buyer would simply not show, since I could just walk 90 seconds back to my home.

That's very handy! I wished I could do that too, but that's not an option for me. So I have to invite them to my home. I've had some pretty strange looking people come over, I can tell you!

This thread is looking like a great argument in favor of StubHub. Sure, they take a cut, but they also put a fairly sound wall between buyer and seller that eliminates all of this nonsense.

Very true, and I still haven't pulled the trigger on that, but I'm thinking about it. I have season tickets to the Redskins, and I simply can't afford to go to every game (about four years ago they raised the price per seat $25 in a single off-season). I end up trying to sell them on Craigslist, and usually it goes pretty well. I thought this year would be better because they got a fantastic new quarterback, but so far I've gotten fewer bites than usual. Maybe because the buyers have all gone to StubHub, too.

The one thing that's always bothered me about StubHub is that before they were around, it used to be written into the season ticket holder agreement that if the organization found that you were scalping your tickets, you would lose the rights to your seats. Now I see tickets on StubHub going for way over face value, but it seems like it's okay because StubHub AND the Redskins are making a little money on those sales too. Lame.

Oh, and I just remembered. The official ticket resale site of the Redskins is some Ticketmaster service that ends up taking a huge chunk of the sale.

I've never used StubHub to sell, but I've used it several times to buy. For concert tickets, it's always been straightforward. Pay your money and an envelope arrives a few days later via FedEx. The one time I used it to buy NFL football tickets, I ordered on the morning of an afternoon game. They had me drive to a small hotel near the stadium where they'd taken over the lobby. I presented my ID and they handed me my tickets. Easy!

For the Eagles/Cardinals game we used StubHub and bought the tickets at 3:30pm and they were delivered at 9:25am the next day. It was painless, except for each ticket being $40 over face value after the markup, service fee, and delivery fee.

I will second the comment that it's not actually Craigslist that you hate.

And yes, I lose my faith in humanity a lot, too.

I’ve sold a few things on CL. I always have the buyer come to my house on my schedule when I’m just working around the house. When I’m asked to “bend” I usually decline. Seems to me the people that ask for “more pictures” or “measure this for me” never seem to come through with the cash. I do sometime supply a user with another picture but only if I feel like it and I have the time.

My expectations of people are so low I don’t get disappointed too often. I think it helps that I live in a small community where everyone pretty well knows everyone else. In talking with them I use the “Kevin Bacon” approach – “So, do you know so and so?” When you can link to a person they are less likely to screw you over, I think.

If I need to sell something for sure in ‘x’ days I use eBay. But CL is a good route to get rid of clutter eventually.

Also some of the scams people try to pull crack me up.

I find most scams can be averted by the line “I’ll remove this listing when the item is sold so there is no need to email me asking if I still have the item.” Then if I do get an email asking if I still have the item it’s off to spam town.

Ugh, that reminds me, I've had a few instances where I've just left a successful sale of something on CL (it does happen every now and then), and I'll get someone emailing me to ask if the item is still available. I'll quickly reply (at a stoplight or something) with a little note like "sorry, it's been sold." Oh boy. I've had one guy cuss me out for not having taken the listing down and for wasting his time. Ugh. Sorry I didn't have my finger on the button while doing the transaction!


Yeah, you're probably right on this.

I have NY Rangers season tickets and Stub Hub is a delight to deal with as a seller, when the league is operating. They are much better than the Ticketbastard league and team sanctioned "fan exchange" crap, and cheaper too. I've made some nice profits on playoff tickets.

I've never had the hotel experience for pickup, as they have an office near Grand Central that is open for a few hours before any scheduled event for pickups, nor have I had them mail anything, since I've only gone through Stub Hub at the last minute, like 2-3 hours before the event when the prices start dropping.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with StubHub, Heather! That's good to know. Yeah, I forgot it was called Ticket Exchange or whatever. I looked into that once and the cut they take is absurd.

I've purchased tickets through StubHub once (a Coldplay concert for my wife's birthday - Robyn opened and it was great), and the experience was a good one. I'll have to look into this...