Craigslist Ghosting

[Scott 2]

I bought something nice. Got tired of it, decided to sell on Craigslist. Made a great ad, got no hits. Slowly lowered the price down to a third of retail, got one low ball for half that, no other contacts. This was with two weeks of posting, and a premium item priced well below Amazon used. It made no sense.

Enter ghosting. Turns out if Craigslist doesn't like your ad, they still create it and give you a link. But, they exclude it from the search results and listing pages, effectively making it invisible. Tricky. I have no idea how the one low ball found me, but learning to search for ghosted ads could be lucrative.

I learned to check for ghosting by searching my ad number fifteen minutes after posting. In my case, the mistake was linking to the Amazon description of what I was selling. Whoops. Already have a hit now, at twenty bucks above the last asking price on my ghosted ad. And here I thought I knew how to use the internet...

[Ego]

Thanks for this!!!! I have a dozen ads running right now and several get no attention at all. That explains it! Now to research why the ghost certain ads.

[sky]

How do you find ghost ads?

[jennypenny]

Why would they do that? It doesn't make any sense to me.

[vexed87]

If they don't like URLs, they might make the add invisible to searches until the post is moderated, I have experienced similar issues with Gumtree, the UK equivalent.

In any case, as sky says, how would you find a hidden item if you didn't have the add ID?

[Spartan_Warrior]

There may be a few different reasons for doing this, but in this case, I'm guessing the rationale is that Craigslist doesn't want to be used as free advertising for external sites, especially a semi-competitor like Amazon where the same item is available used.

[Scott 2]

I too would like to know how to find ghosted ads. It is clearly possible, because the one low ball reached me. I have not figured out how.

IMO it's a smart way of dealing with spammers and violations of their terms of service. I'm sure they have multiple layers of defense, but I bet this stops a lot of casual attempts to post junk ads.

[Ego]

Why would they do that? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Mobile. The challenge with phones is to present the most useful info to eyeballs while weeding out the clutter. Ebay has been doing this for a few years with their "Best Match" search results. Great stuff can be had by finding and sniping auctions on Ebay that are not "Best Match" quality listings. The irony is that there are many of these poor listings because people use their phones to create them.

[luxagraf]

I too would like to know how to find ghosted ads. It is clearly possible, because the one low ball reached me. I have not figured out how.

It's a little primitive, but I just messed around with a Google site search and found things that weren't in the top results when I did the same search on Craigslist.

basically just: search term site:http://yourlocal.craigslist.org

And then restricted results to only show things posted in the last month and sorted them by date.

Not sure if it surfaced any ghosted listings, but it did grab things people had mis-categorized.

[tommytebco]

Thanks for the tip. I've been trying to sell an old cell phone with no interest. I had a link to the manufacturer in the ad. I have now edited out that link. We'll see if that helps.