Better, but still no cigar (gumtree.com)

Name: grahamt

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Product:	gumtree.com
Date:	04/04/08 (99 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free ads; perhaps a larger audience?

Disadvantages: No record kept onsite of the ads you have posted

If you have read my recent review of ItsMyMarket you will know that I have quite a lot of "stuff" cluttering up the house and of which I am trying to dispose. Much of this is not potentially high value but nevertheless could well be useful to someone else. Ever being the materialist I am keen to see if I could recover a few quid for these items but the problem of advertising is always that the cost of the advert can outweigh the potential value of the sale. What is needed is an effective means of advertising that is free of charge.

I thought I had found the answer in ItsMyMarket but my experiences have shown that it is relatively ineffective, for a number of reasons. I have gone to the extent of letting ItsMyMarket know about my experiences in using their Internet resource and to suggest improvements that might result in greater success, both for them and for their potential users. I am heartened that they took the time to respond positively and to reveal that they will be taking my recommendations into consideration.

In the meantime I still need an effective marketplace for my items for disposal, at least until everyone has had their chance and I finally resort to FreeCycle first and then the local council waste disposal if all else fails. That's when I came across Gumtree.

At first glance Gumtree offers exactly the same capability as ItsMyMarket and so you wonder why it was felt necessary for two such to be created. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure just how these people make money. I assume they do. I know that you can stump up some cash to make your advert a featured one but it's unlikely that anyone would do that unless the potential value of the item being sold warranted it.

The Home Page of Gumtree announces that it is "London's online community". This is all very well but what if you don't live in London? Despair not, on the right of the webpage is a panel headed "Other Cities". Here you can find the various regions of the UK and within each region a list of towns (or, in the case of Essex, counties) with which you may wish instead to be associated. The list is not limited to the UK though. Cities in countries as far away as Poland and even Australia are listed as well. Nowhere else in Europe though; maybe there are other alternatives to Gumtree available locally!

You would want to be associated with a more local centre because, as with ItsMyMarket, it's recognised that for low value items the cost of transport can make the proposition uneconomic and so you would want to collect in person rather than have an item shipped, therefore it needs to be close by.

The centre of the Home Page lists the categories of items being advertised. These range from Flats and Houses for sharing or for rental, jobs and services but most especially, "Stuff for Sale", with a separate category for "Cars for Sale". In addition, as with ItsMyMarket, there are sections for Community issues such as rideshare, lost&found and events and gigs. However, unlike ItsMyMarket, this doesn't appear to extend to community website hosting. There is, though, a Friends and Dating section.

On the left are buttons for various functions and the first is probably the one you are after - "post an ad". Here is the major difference between ItsMyMarket and Gumtree. On Gumtree you do not need to register with the website in order to post an ad. You simply create your ad and include in it the contact information that you want to have included.

So, let's post an ad.

Firstly it asks in which part of the site you want your ad posted and in my case this has been under Stuff for Sale. Currently you get an immediate warning about the scam relating to potential "customers" posting you a cheque for an amount higher than the value of your item, asking you to refund the difference (perhaps we should call this the "Nigerian" Cash-back scam!?).

Having been duly warned we finally get to create our ad. Firstly we choose a more precise category such as Household goods / furniture and then an even more detailed category such as Kitchen appliances. There is even a "Give it away for free!" category but I must admit I would be more inclined to use FreeCycle for that. Eventually after getting more and more exact in some categories, you finally get to the form where you fill in that actual details of your item(s).

The main information you enter is your location, at the level of a district or local town name only. You are not expected to enter your address. You enter your offer price, a title for your item and then a description of what it is that you have for sale. You are offered the opportunity to have your ad featured for 3 or 7 days for £5 or £10 pounds respectively but the default is "Free".

You then enter your contact information. Now, this is where it gets a bit odd. Unlike ItsMyMarket, which only asks for the first part of your postcode, Gumtree asks for all of it, but this is optional. I prefer ItsMyMarket's approach so I don't enter anything here. You then get asked to enter your contact email address or telephone number or a Skype Id, if you use Skype. However, just below this is a tick-box to hide your email address if desired. The strange thing is that it is already ticked but greyed out so you can't change it! The result is that contact with you by potential buyers can only be made relayed via Gumtree itself.

The next section is where you fill in your own contact information for Gumtree alone. This will not be published with any advert or anywhere else on the site. You are asked to enter a password for your advert so that you can later edit or delete it. You also have to tick a box to indicate that you agree with Gumtree's Ts&Cs.

As well as your description you can add video and pictures. A video is via a link to a YouTube URL where, I assume, you have to post it. It seems that Gumtree itself will not host videos, only photos. I guess that's a space thing. You can, however, post up to three photos rather than just the two that ItsMyMarket permits.

Finally you can take a look at your masterpiece and then post it to the site. In return Gumtree sends you an email confirming the posting and advising you of the unique reference number for your ad. You must keep this email because this is the major difference between ItsMyMarket and Gumtree. Whereas ItsMyMarket requires you to register, in return it keeps a list on the website of your personal ads which you can access when you log in. As you do not need to log in with Gumtree the emails it sends you are your only record of the ads you have posted.

So, where now is this masterpiece you have created? Well, nowhere to be seen on the Home Page, that's for sure. ItsMyMarket does at least feature the most recent few ads on its Home Page and yours will be at the top of the list until pushed off by newer ones. With Gumtree you have to go searching. You do this through the categories on the Home Page where we started. In the category you chose, yours will be at the top until displaced by newer ads.

So, how do potential buyers find your prized items? Well, they either do it the same way or else they can do something you can't do with ItsMyMarket, they can subscribe to receive notification of new items in categories in which they are interested. This is probably the one major benefit that Gumtree has over ItsMyMarket other than that you can also save ads of interest that you may have found, for later more detailed examination.

One other thing that Gumtree enables is that after seven days you get an email from them saying effectively "Looks like you haven't sold it. Want to repost it?". What that does it gives you a chance to pop your ad back to the top of the list. What Gumtree would obviously like you to divvy up for a featured ad.

So, that's it really. Not a lot to choose between them. My experiences with Gumtree do show a slightly higher hit rate but I will continue to use both in any case. Neither is perfect but between the two of them I reckon on having a better chance that just using one.

Summary: Another free ads site that is no better or worse than the others.