How does Gumtree work

andygb

I am only asking this because I have advertised my car for sale - it is a real cheapy but we are going to run just one car.
I placed an ad in Gumtree on Friday, and I have had 19 views. However, this morning I had an email from "Gumtree mail" saying that someone wanted to give me slightly less than the asking price for the car, and if I was interested I should reply to the email.
I have not used Gumtree before, so I assumed that I would get a reply on the page where I had logged in on the site.
Is this genuine?

Brooker_Dave

Gumtree is now owned by ebay, and does it's level best to prevent buyers and sellers directly emailing each other (why), you have to reply to the email and hope the buyer phones you.

Be prepared for endless text messages from scammers, either pretending that you've won a prize in a competition you didn't enter or people on oilrigs offereing way over the odds for your car.

andygb

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

Gumtree is now owned by ebay, and does it's level best to prevent buyers and sellers directly emailing each other (why), you have to reply to the email and hope the buyer phones you.

Be prepared for endless text messages from scammers, either pretending that you've won a prize in a competition you didn't enter or people on oilrigs offereing way over the odds for your car.

Cheers I thought thay may be the case

Big_W

Although you do have to be prepared for a degree of spam when selling on Gumtree, this doesn't look like a spam message to me.

Gumtree doesn't show you incoming messages on Gumtree's own pages, they're routed to your normal email address.

Some Gumtree categories, including motors, show the user a "Make Offer" button - your message sounds like somebody's trying to make an offer that way.

Personally when selling anything on Gumtree, I disable the email contact option, as I've very rarely got anything other than timewasters that way. Serious buyers tend to call, a few text, but it's rare (for me) to get a sale through emails or offers like the above.

Do note that Gumtree ads default to not showing your telephone number, so if you do want it to show, then you need to tick the checkbox near the bottom when submitting your listing.

Good luck....