Selling the car on Ebay

We recently sold a car on Ebay – well, actually I sold the car on Ebay but it was hubby’s car, so I guess that makes it a joint effort. This car was nearly 10 years old and it was just a car you know ^*1. It had tax and Mot and no more dents and scratches than the odd supermarket trolley could inflict. It had an average mileage, was an average colour and was fine…nothing to complain about.

I had a slew of e-mails with questions about it…some quite bizarre – does it have (insert famous brand name here) floor mats(!), are the details in the listing correct (well, duh, no, I made it all up!) – all kinds of things and then the phone calls came. People actually requested contact details from Ebay so they could call me. I thought that was a bit off, if I’d wanted them to phone, I’d have put a number!

Anyway, I had two people really interested – one who promised to pay a deposit into my Paypal account within the hour if I only removed the listing and someone else who lived 20 miles away who wanted to come and see it. I waited for my deposit to arrive before removing the listing – it didn’t come – so what was that about? They guy who lived 20 miles away phoned me 6 times telling me when he couldn’t make it before finally telling me that he couldn’t come to see it until after the listing had ended.

I rent my clothes a little and tore some hair out….

Anyway, 7 days went by, the auction ended and I had two bids out of the blue – both for an amount I was happy with. The winning bidder called:

“Can you pick me up from the train station on Monday – I’ll bring cash”.

So, I did and he did and that was that.

I guess the moral of this tale is, if you auction your car, unless the guy is there, with you, waving cash under your nose, then you’d best just sit the auction out as it’ll all come good in the end!

^*1It’s a Gag Hulfrunt quote …ish!