machinery sales website

Agri contractor · 02-03-2012 10:03PM #1

We are building a website to advertise machinery for sale and wanted. We have all functions in place and we are making it easy to use, no complicated actions to register or advertise. Could anyone give me their thoughts on developing such a website.

Red Sheds · 02-03-2012 10:48PM

Best of luck with your new website, simplicity is the key for the seller who has to upload items for sale and the buyer who wants to search and find what they are looking for easily and quickly.

I really think you are up against it with Donedeal who have built their business on avery simple and easy to use website and to add to that easy ways for the seller to pay for their advertisment. Many have tried to copy Donedeal but none succeeded, it has a huge public awareness and useability / likeability factorwhich is very important for an ecommerce site. It will take alot of money to get a new site to this level.

However maybe you are aiming this at a different market, maybe the trade or for specalist machinery etc. I think you have to find your niche what ever that is, so getting that right at the start is important.

Best of luck and look forward to seeing it, post a link to it here if you want and we can comment more.

Agri contractor · 03-03-2012 10:52AM

Red Sheds wrote: »

Best of luck with your new website, simplicity is the key for the seller who has to upload items for sale and the buyer who wants to search and find what they are looking for easily and quickly.

I really think you are up against it with Donedeal who have built their business on avery simple and easy to use website and to add to that easy ways for the seller to pay for their advertisment. Many have tried to copy Donedeal but none succeeded, it has a huge public awareness and useability / likeability factorwhich is very important for an ecommerce site. It will take alot of money to get a new site to this level.

However maybe you are aiming this at a different market, maybe the trade or for specalist machinery etc. I think you have to find your niche what ever that is, so getting that right at the start is important.

Best of luck and look forward to seeing it, post a link to it here if you want and we can comment more.

Thanks Redsheds. I do have a good domain name. I have it with a long time. I tried this before and it failed due to a website designer. I held on to the domain name and now I have a good website developer. I know it will be hard to compete with done deal, my site will be similar in actions but not in looks. I am also putting in an offer page, that is if the seller wants to accept offers. I have looked at many sites and many are to complicated. The sections i will have in place are agriculture,construction,groundacre,commercial,jobs,and parts. Hopefully by this day next week I will have it near completion. i will post it for comment.

bog_savage · 03-03-2012 11:35AM

Two things I like to see are price and whether its trade or private .
Price would be most important , if its not priced , I usually dont give it a second look

bbam · 03-03-2012 11:41AM

bog_savage wrote: »

Two things I like to see are price and whether its trade or private .
Price would be most important , if its not priced , I usually dont give it a second look

Definitely adds need to have a price and some way of avoiding everyone putting every word under the sun in as a description as it ruins searching.

Agri contractor · 03-03-2012 08:22PM

Thanks for the comments. all help appreciated. I agree with putting in the price, but some people will not do this, as for description this is another problem some people do get carried away. I will just have to monitor the site and make changes were needed. Its all a learning process. Can anyone give me their thoughts on placing an offer on machinery were the seller allow this ?

Bitten & Hisses · 04-03-2012 11:34AM

Agri contractor wrote: »

I agree with putting in the price, but some people will not do this

I can never figure this out. Why do people have such a problem quoting realistic prices? If you need to allow them to persist in keeping price a secret, could you put in a facility to exclude unpriced or POA adverts from search results? Autotrader used to have this facility and it was very handy.

ruxpin82 · 04-03-2012 05:34PM

I would say encourage people to put in a price, but you may find advertisers will not use you if you don't have a POA option.

Do not be like Farmandplant, that website is absolute rubbish due to
their poor catagorisation of the different types of machinery, and the fact that the advertisers don't update/remove the ad when the machine is sold.
So I would suggest that at the very least, every ad should have the date it was posted/amended/readvertised (similar to Donedeal), or else an expiry period.

Donedeal is a good system, a similar idea but with more in depth catagories wouldn't be bad, the Farm machinery section on it does seem to have alot of scrap in it, so maybe a section for old/low value stuff would sort the wheat from the chaff.

pakalasa · 04-03-2012 06:11PM

Have a look at Donedeal...:D

How not to run a website - Farm And plant...:mad:

fastrac · 04-03-2012 07:45PM

Agree with previous re Donedeal.They could badly do with a filtering system to allow you to exclude items on price simular to Carzone. I would also like to be able to search multiple categories and counties of my choice in the one search. I think that the biggest threat to this type of all kinds of everything site is the amount of tyre kickers that reply to ads turning people off advertising and your idea of a specialist site might be a better option to get serious buyers for big ticket items.

Agri contractor · 04-03-2012 08:34PM

I agree. I get fustrated with no pricing on ads. I will have to mark them so then a person can chose if they want to go into the ad or not. My plan is to get the ads in and categorise them later if the site works. I have seen some sites that started off with loads of categories and half of them empty.

masseys scrap and zetors no better · 04-03-2012 11:33PM

Fair play to you,one thing i will say is that you need to make your pricing cheaper than donedeal,if im going to pay equal money to advertise i would be advertising on the well established website not the one thats only starting up.but if it was cheaper i would consider it.