Craigslist releases new mobile app for iOS and Android | Hacker News Reader

Craigslist releases new mobile app for iOS and Android

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216 pointspkamb149 comments

I'm not sure this is a direct competitor or not but just to pass on info to HNers, here in Japan Mercari is #1 for buying and selling used stuff online.

It's mobile 1st. Take a picture of the item you want to sell, add a price and it's on sale. They've done nearly everything possible to make things as seamless as possible. When a sale happens you get notified where and how to ship it. They partnered with the post office and the 50k+ convenience stores so you can ship from the stores. At both locations they auto print labels via QR codes and offer fixed box sizes. I think they do a little bit of escrow (not 100% sure the actual mechanics) but I believe the buyer pays immediately but the funds are not forwarded until the buyer approves the item. (really not sure about this part)

Certain things seem like it might only fit Japan. The convenience store partnership is huge since, at least in populous areas there is always multiple within 2-5 min walk. Even post offices are relatively many. I also don't know to what extent a more trustworthy populus helps.

They are hiring like crazy and hiring foreigners as well if you want a job in Japan. They're probably the #1 company for running dev meetups in Tokyo and those meetups feel like SV, all English, in rooms that might as well be at Google Mountain View including food and kitchens etc..

AFAIK they've had no luck replicating their success outside Japan

In Australia where I live, selling goods online outside the likes of eBay and normal ecommerce has become a generally painful experience.

Facebook marketplace (and Gumtree to a lesser degree) have given the buyer this weird desire to lowball on pricing to the point of insult. It's almost like as soon as people open Facebook, they become this extreme version of themselves, and this extends to "haggling".

I thought it's only a Polish phenomenon. It's bit of a meme in Poland, about services such as Olx. People try to haggle for every product. Let's say the price for a product is $300, you will have people messaging you with messages like "$50 and I'm there in few hours", often being aggressive if you refuse them. Also a common method is try to get emotional and lie to get a better offer, for example claiming to be a single mother who wants to bring joy to her child.

The worst thing is when people come and start haggling right at the very end, trying to force you to sell at a lower price.

I started to flat-out refuse to offer ANY discount. You should have thought about the price before coming, not try to put a psychological burden on me and force me to discount the product at the last moment.

But yes, in general selling is painful (here in Poland). I find the lack of standardized packaging and shipping prices especially annoying. I could sell lots more if somebody took care of supplying standard boxes with standardized shipping pricing.

This used to be the case in Dubai when I used to live there. The defacto classifieds website in UAE is called dubizzle (dubizzle.com) which is a subsidiary of OLX. People used to use similar (in fact, worse) haggling tactics to get things for cheap. Couple this with spam and selling an item becomes a nightmare. On the contrary, I have had a far better experience on Kijiji and Facebook in Canada.

I've only ever had one person try to haggle with me on US Ebay but he was trying to buy all of my stock so it made sense that he wanted some volume discount. I've sold stuff on forums before and that is always a haggling experience. It's pretty much expected to have someone haggle with you even if you don't say OBO (or best offer). It's mostly good, sometimes people will throw in some goods to bring the cash price down or you might waive the paypal fees if they have a good reputation. You still get a lot of "PM me ur lowest price", like if you don't want to pay sticker price, you have to play the haggle game a little bit. I would always mark things up a bit more than what I actually wanted to get for it just so I had room to haggle the price down a bit.

People really love when they think they are getting a deal or somehow taking advantage of the seller so it's better to entertain them a little bit if it's going to get the sale.

>I would always mark things up a bit more than what I actually wanted to get for it just so I had room to haggle the price down a bit.

I always thought that was kind of the standard way of selling things in an informal situation. I just assume everyone's going to haggle or barter so might as well just do it that way. I get the price I wanted, they feel like they got a deal and everyone's happy.

On an aside, my grandma came from travellers. She was probably the best haggler i've seen. She managed to haggle in Sears and places like that successfully. She had this story about being a poor old Scottish pensioner. They also drove across Canada years and years ago with some of her relatives and would set up a fortune telling booth where they stopped. Her sister would case the people waiting asking about their lives, then my grandma would 'tell their fortune'.

Definitely a lot of tyre kickers. Every time I've marked something I'm selling as e.g. '$500 negotiable' I get tons of messages saying "what's your best price" or "what's your lowest offer?"

That's not how haggling works. My lowest offer is $500 until I hear yours.

Aside from that, I've had good experiences selling old video game consoles on Gumtree.

"Negotiable" is the magic word that invites bargaining. Just list the price alone and people will assume it's negotiable, unless the term "firm" is included somewhere near the price. Even then, some people don't read, so that crowd just comes with the territory of selling things online.

I have a simple rule. If the offer is less than 80% of the asking price, then I assume it's a lowball and simply ignore it and the offeror.

And yet I've bought many items with patience at those prices. There was a bike I wanted originally listed at $1800. I offered 1000 as that's what it was worth. Every week it was relisted $50 lower, every week I dropped my offer by like $25. Ended selling buying for $700 (I emailed the seller so much they were chatting with me). Took 7 months but the demand was just not there. At the end guy was like sigh should have sold for $1k.

Some people list at a fair price. If that's what it is I'll not even haggle. like bought a fully CNC taig mini Mill with computer software and 4th axis for $900. Hand cash walk out. Fair price.

Other shit is obviously over priced and so you negotiate.

Sold a lathe recently for $1400. I had firm on the price. Took a year to sell. Sold firm.

It also depends on the product here. Consumer popular shit like games and cars have a lot of negotiation. Some tools. Other shit is less negotiated.

Some shit is high demand and lots of haggling like motorcycles. I just enjoy the hell out of telling people no.

"That offer is offensive and I've setup a block list for you"

> And yet I've bought many items with patience at those prices. There was a bike I wanted originally listed at $1800. I offered 1000 as that's what it was worth. Every week it was relisted $50 lower, every week I dropped my offer by like $25. Ended selling buying for $700 (I emailed the seller so much they were chatting with me). Took 7 months but the demand was just not there. At the end guy was like sigh should have sold for $1k.

I like this strategy.

This is my experience in Switzerland with generally polite population - set an exact price (without that 'firm' wording though), and we got like 10 generic questions what is our lowest price, or people offering 50% or below. Suffice to say the one reasonable person got that product.

This seems like inexperience on our side and naive expectation for more reasonable approach, but it really felt borderline rude.

The people asking what's the lowest price and such and most likely to be time-wasters. This applies to all transactions, I find.

Of course, there are cultures where haggling is the norm so, in these cases, it's best to start with an artificially high price which enables you to keep making concessions until you reach the price you wanted anyways.

I usually respond to that by asking "What's the most you will pay?" Then I get their lowball answer and tell them that it looks like we can't agree on a price.

What's your best price is a good tactic with a poor negotiator or someone who isn't attached to the item. Maybe they play the numbers and it works. Just like you though, I hate that tactic when tried on me and it will never work.

I once sold an iPhone to a 16 year old. I said "I want $300 but I'm willing to negotiate" and he said "okay, how about $350?"

That was a good day.

Sometimes I do this when I don't want to haggle; I just want a price on which I can decide a simple go/no-go.

I would always mark up my prices for things on forums a little bit so I had room to haggle it down but I never entertained people asking what my lowest price was. If you can't afford sticker price, you can afford to haggle. It was a pretty niche marketplace so there was pretty much never going to be anything like those crazy thrift store finds where someone buys something worth $5000 for $5, all the sellers usually had a good idea what their stuff was worth and priced appropriately. There were always the morons who priced their junk 5x it's market value but those people were too stupid to haggle with, they would get insulted when you offered a good market price.

When I don't want to haggle (which is often, as I hate it) I simply take the posted price and pay that or ignore the offer. I will never ask for a cheaper price if not interested in haggling. People with deliberately overblown prices which never expect anyone to actually pay that will simply not get my business at all in that case.

If you don't want to haggle, then you get the listed price.

I personally hate haggling, but I do appreciate the raw efficiency as opposed to arbitrarily set prices. Maybe the ideal would be some built-in automated haggling: you set a desired starting price, and a private "red line", and the prospective buyers do the same. Then the bots can haggle and maybe dynamically update the prices as they discover more information about the market.

eBay has (or had?) this in the "Best Offer" feature. Not available on all listings though.

So ebay?

We have the other issue in Germany on ebay kleinanzeigen (Germany's version of Gumtree / Craigslist) where sellers will expect prices on used goods comparable to buying them new.

I don't think anyone replying to you understands how much the selling experience varies by what you're selling. If you're selling used tires or consumer electronics you are gonna wind up dealing with idiots 24/7 no matter which platform you choose because everyone is a potential buyer for those things.

If you're selling things that are only of use to a few people cost more than a grand, weigh more than a couple tons and don't move on their own you'll generally only deal with people who are serious about buying.

My fb marketplace has the opposite problem. Everyone seems to list their stuff at retail price (or higher!)

I sent one lady an amazon link to show her she was overcharging. Didn’t help.

And even worse, Facebook has the suggested message to send to seller. So many people click “is it still available?” And after my prompt response never write back. I’d estimate over half of people don’t respond at all. It’s so weird.

Sounds like craigslist in the US. Someone once offered me football tickets in lieu of the asking price on the car I was selling.

Took about 3 months but eventually got the price I was asking for. Had to wade through a lot of BS though.

My wife's friend used to make a habit of offering to pay people on CraigsList cash for things, and then showing up with 10%-15% less cash than she committed to. Usually people were annoyed but eager enough to get rid of the thing that they sold to her anyway to avoid the hassle of posting it again. But it was scummy.

I've had people do this to me. It irritates me so much that I tell them 'your loss'. Someone offered to go get the rest and I called them out on this scummy practice and moved on with my life.

I've had tons of people do this to me, too - in fact, I am guilty of having done it (like when people ask for a $50 multiple knowing full well that ATMS only dispense $20 bills and I'm short on time to be able to break a $20).

As the seller, though, you should know that they value their time enough to at least be present, so they obviously want the item enough. You've got enough leverage to be able to tell the buyer who does that 'No'. I've said and had that said to me in those occasions.

Yup, the complainers on the sell-side should accede that roughly half the value derived from a sold item is out-of-sight-out-of-mind.

The UX is poor. Haggling should be automatic. Make it an auction - allow everyone to post their offers and then the seller can take the offer they accept based on price, location or whatever. To make it work, the offer has to be committed as long as it is posted. Hey, come to think of it, isn't this a description of how stock markets work? The ultimate haggling.

And you just invented eBay?

Mercari is starting to grow in the States but it's having a hard time going against eBay. I tried it out for my store and got like no traction, listed the same thing on eBay and they sold pretty much instantly.

I'd love to see it really take off here as a competitor to eBay would be great.

Ebay started using not so nice tactics to cash on the number of sales by automatically enabling the "Make offer" option, no matter if disabled by the seller, at every posting renewal at ridiculous prices, often half or less than half the initial price, so if I have say 20 items for sale at already a very convenient price, they will renew with the make offer option enabled (regardless if I explicitly disabled it) at half or less that price which of course mean I'll receive loads of offers at prices that sometimes won't ever cover the shipping. I can understand their motives: more sales = more sales fees, but that's not fair at all. As of today I haven't found a way to keep the option disabled and have to get online in time at every renewal and disable the option on all items, or refuse all offers and politely contact the users explaining the reason.

This makes me angry; although I have been an extremely happy Ebay user for over a decade, we badly need other options because the lack of competition is giving them too much power. Admittedly however, Ebay works well enough so far, which is why it would be really hard to compete against them.

Seems like a bug, I've seen some people complain but others not have it happen, myself included.

But that's kinda been the theme for them recently, so much stuff has been broken, and they end up just pushing the sellers for it through either automatically siding with the buyer or higher fees. Their recent sales tax thing is getting really annoying for bookkeeping.

I wish it was a bug; I reported this in a recent survey but neither the problem was solved (very likely one binary field in a database) nor I was contacted for an explanation.

In the Seattle area, offer up has been taking off and has so far been much better than Facebook marketplace about lowballing. Generally things sell quickly and buyers are much more serious.

Do they do shipments or is it still local only?

Do people actually ship items to buyers on Craigs List? In Canada, Kijiji (the only popular online classified system) explicitly says that you should meet with the seller face-to-face. They offer PayPal payments (being owned by eBay), but say something like "Pay with PayPal when you meet with the buyer" or something.

Craigslist has the same warnings - meet to exchange product and payment in person, anyone trying to do it through mail/online is probably a scammer.

Maybe in Eastern Canada. In BC Craigslist is the only viable platform and Kijiji is a ghost town.

Huh, it's the opposite in Ontario. Perhaps I shouldn't extrapolate my experiences to the whole country.

Ditto in Alberta -- Kijiji or bust.

Japan sounds like a high tech society that is seamless yet it is not as futuristic as it seems.

Tokyo feels like a vision of the future, as decided in the 1980s.

AKA awesome.

What I really love about Tokyo is the coexistence of high tech and tradition. Like a small shrine in the middle of city hidden among the skyscrappers.

> AFAIK they've had no luck replicating their success outside Japan

Anecdata, in the US I knew someone in college that made enough to sustain themselves by doing arbitrage of Lululemon clothing on mainly Mercari, but also poshmark and eBay. The market was active enough for an individual to maintain 50-100 items in stock consistently buying and selling.

Mercari would automatically provide a USPS label, or would give the seller the option of shipping themselves. Mercari wouldn't go so far as "ship from here on this date," but was more of a "let us know that you sent it."

I can't remember which directions, but for buyer/seller conflicts mercari support leaned heavily towards one side, poshmark the other.

Post offices may be many, but their opening hours make it essentially impossible to visit them if you're working. (Unless you want to visit during lunch break and take whatever your received home on your hour-long commute.)

i've received many packages at the convenience store but not everything is shippable there. My local 7/11 just installed a set of shipping lockers so maybe I can receive more stuff without being home. On the hand it's one reason to opt for an apartment complex that has a way to receive packages.

They have a commercial that runs pretty often on one of the streaming services I use (I can't remember if it is Pluto or Hulu)so they are trying to expand in the USA.

All English is a bit overstatement here. Meetups maybe, but the office it's a different story.

Neat, TIL.

In the US my only exposure to Mercari have been low budget Youtube ads that make it look like a side project from a high schooler. I guess that's marketing at work (or not at work).

OfferUp has been good in Norcal

OfferUp, at least in SoCal, is mostly stolen stuff.

You'll mostly see people selling lots of completely unrelated goods, all in "original packaging, never opened", at good prices. It's stuff stolen from people's front doors.

Have yet to use the mobile apps, but kudos to the Craigslist team for making their website one of the best mobile experiences out there. Loads quickly, easy to navigate, and isn't missing features compared to desktop. Certainly doesn't have the look we expect from a modern website but there's a level of usability we can all aspire to.

I find craigslist's fast loading pages to be problematic.

I think their website would be improved by rewriting it entirely in JavaScript, transpiling the JavaScript to JavaScript, requiring the JavaScript to render, re-implementing the entire UI in JavaScript including hyperlinks, then running JavaScript on the server to generate HTML, sending the HTML to the browser, also sending the JavaScript bundle with megabytes of hipster fonts and random people's github repos to insert spaces in a string and stuff, then finally re-rendering the client's page after the multi-megabyte JavaScript bundle finishes downloading.

Now that is the nice modern user experience I have come to demand as a user in 2019.

Don’t forget breaking the back button miserably and ensuring there are no URL’s that can be copied and pasted.

Also to spam about using cookies and ask for the location data every single time you visit.

Ah the ultimate Single Page Abomination (as I jokingly call it even though I do my own at work but everything has its place).

Course Svelte is what might be the game changer in this regard.

You forgot notification permissions.

I really wish I could tell the browser to default those to "Nope" for me.

I'm sure you can, at least on Safari. The default is "ask" but you can change it to "deny". I'd be surprised if other browsers don't allow this.

You can in Chrome and Firefox, it's buried in the config setting though.

> ensuring there are no URL’s that can be copied and pasted

Google maps does this with addresses. Why can't they just let someone copy the text. I don't understand why it's so purposefully hostile to users.

Don't forget browser compatibility IE10 and up with an extra 10mb of polyfills...

It saddens me that people learn to write "Hello World" on a website after downloading 1200 packages from npm...

If a site feels unusable like this it's because you're the not the user. News sites, for example, are SPAs because they want to sell you ads. It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the business using it.

Which news sites are SPA's? I haven't seen that. Most are usable without javsacript, though the experience is diminished and some have such harsh lazy-loading that the images are all invisible. And menus/search may be broken. I've never had a problem with navigation, though.

How are SPA-s and displaying ads related? The reload / page model benefits news sites more since they can generate more pageviews and hence ad reloads. There really is no connections. Devs implement SPA-s because they think it's better user experience (yes, it's hard to get it right).

I doubt anyone relying on ad revenue to run a business equates pageviews with HTTP requests to the server anymore.

You can still do ads (and they have been done for decades) without SPAs. In fact SPAs would reduce the efficiency of the ad tracking as the ad JS is now competing for resources with the SPA JS.

The point is if their goal was to just serve news or articles the site would be just thin layer over a CDN serving raw HTML. In order to serve and track dynamic advertisements they build sites with MBs of JavaScript instead.

I feel personally attacked

Reading that stressed me out so much.

I came for this and was not disappointed. Please continue.

You mean Magento??

Strongly disagree that Craigslist should be held up as an example of a usable website.

The Web 1.0 look is fine.

But if you use CL a lot you'll know how bad the UX is, especially on mobile, especially compared to mobile-first camera-focused apps.

I can think of 5-10 incredibly annoying non-standard Craigslist UX elements off the top of my head.

You didn’t actually mention any specific criticisms.

- there aren't great ways for people to offer multiple items apart from making one listing with all the stuff (And having to update all the time)

- You have to do the whole "negotiate payment mechansim and shipping" thing every time. They could easily provide a sort of flow for when an agreement has happened

- On the buyer side you gotta basically just go in and delete your listing when it's done

There's an alternate universe in craigslist where you could somehow signal "I have a potential buyer" to put the thing in hold, and a single-button finalisation step when its done. Similarly, sellers could be able to register certain info to just plop it into a message.

I understand that the existing UX (mainly e-mail forwarding) makes this hard. But... well maybe they can change their UX

These are valid issues but I think they aren't a big deal. Every other platform I've seen that tries to be "smart" and offer these features ends up overdoing it and making it way too complicated & time consuming to post an ad for the first time.

CL in contrast is easy & understandable. You post an ad, post a price, and done. No "profile" or "account" to manage, etc.

After using letgo to buy and sell I will never use craigslist again. Night and day in terms of usability.

> I can think of 5-10 incredibly annoying non-standard Craigslist UX elements off the top of my head.

Yes?

Here's a quick one (of many).

In every dropdown menu you've ever used, the currently selected item pops up in the center of the control. The other items are arranged above and below the currently selected item.

https://i.imgur.com/H7Mrs6B.png

Craigslist's view selector instead lays out the items below the control. "List" is always placed within the control, despite not being active. To select "List" you need to click what should be the currently selected item.

https://i.imgur.com/UPlljil.png

Completely unnatural experience and still trips me up every time I use it.

This is subjective, and also wrong. It's wrong because I use dropdowns all the time that always extend the entire list downward. I just double checked gmail and feedly for my own sanity. It's subjective because there is an advantage to static positioning: it allows the mind to develop a map of where each item is in non-relativistic terms, so selecting a given value is always the same two clicks.

Feedly and Gmail drop the entire menu down below the control. You're right, those kind of custom menus work fine. Note that the currently selected item is still always shown within the custom control.

https://i.imgur.com/kd83CAK.png

Craigslist positions the first item of the static list within the control, forcing you to awkwardly select the control itself to select the first item. I have to think about it literally every time I use that drop down.

https://i.imgur.com/UPlljil.png

The Craigslist UX is FAR superior than almost any other mobile UX. I use craigslist literally every day, and I praise its mobile design. If I could disagree with you on your assessment any more strongly, I would.

CL desktop works pretty damn good on mobile if you don't mind pinching and zooming.

For anyone who hasn't used Craigslist in years due to FB groups/Marketplace, OfferUp, and others: IMO it's only improved since the rise of competitors. I did lots of buying and selling on Craigslist as a college student, then stopped using it for years until recently.

I paid $5 to post a used truck for sale ad on craigslist. The only responses I got was from scammers. I posted for free on facebook market place with copy pasta text + pictures. 10+ inquiries and sold it in 2 days for my asking price. craigslist is going down the tubes and they are just cynically capitalizing on every bit of revenue they can before it fades into obscurity.

Except you need a FB account. Craiglist isn't going to track you all over the web and include your sales and purchases in your advertising and whatever other profiles.

There's a lot of funny business on any public want-ad board. I appreciate one that doesn't want to know the intimate details of my life for their financial benefit. I have to laugh at calling Craigslist the cynical ones in this case...

> and they are just cynically capitalizing on every bit of revenue they can before it fades into obscurity.

What? Did you want your money back for your first ad? Oh right it was free and completely un monetized. Can you say the same for your fb marketplace ad? I bet you saw ads at every step in the process.

I’ve found in my travels that local buy/sell tools are very localized. I.e. in some cities craigslist is the only game in town. In others, it’s barely used. It sounds like you live somewhere where cl is not the best way to sell. I live somewhere where it is definitely still the best way to sell. I worry about fb fragmenting the market, but for now cl is still king here.

Meanwhile I posted my car for $5 and got multiple offers within 2 hours. In fact, the ad was so successful with selling my car that I actually couldn't keep up with it and basically ended up selling to the first person I clicked reply to.

Maybe your product was bad? Do you live in an area devoid of people? I'm sure I also got about 10% of people trying to scam me somehow, like convincing me to come out and then claiming they didn't bring the money, but eh, I didn't feel like going through the trouble of putting it on eBay

I'm surprised they are going strong to this day without mobile apps and innovation.

Agreed, especially if you’re trying to buy weird items Craigslist is still the place to shop

I love how their product screenshots show a 2 BR Victorian in San Francisco for $2,000 / month. At least they're honest about how many scammy fake listings are on their site.

A classic case of your designers placeholder finding its way past final review

The Hippie Van for $420 is a nice touch too.

Late edit: 4 BD not 2.

Google Play Store link for Android app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist...

The Android app requires you to sign in with a Google account, which is disappointing in terms of privacy.

Wow the reviews are night and day between Google and iOS.

They require access to your google account to sign in which is clearly not needed. Most people HATE this, myself included.

Craigslist has held on to its market share quite strongly for a long time, but more recently it has clearly started to weaken with Facebook Marketplace and a plethora of more special-purpose apps that are much more mobile-centric. I'm glad they are finally starting to defend their share. I'll be curious to watch: time will tell if they were too late in transitioning to mobile or will it be just fine for them.

I find that Nextdoor gets me more responses on for-sale items and none of them are scams. On Craigslist I get fewer and the majority are scams. I only bother with Craigslist these days when I’m looking to buy, or if I’m selling an item expensive enough to worry about getting the best price.

Does anyone use CL anymore? It's basically all spam (Keyword dumpers that CL doesn't care about apparently) anytime I search for anything, and I used to be able to sell a laptop on there in 1-3 days. Now I can go weeks without getting a legitimate response.

So much spam on the other end of it as well.

I live in the East Bay and have used Craigslist a few times and will continue to use them. Bought a bike, a TV, and some music gear. Going forward I'm going to try to never buy new music gear again, only used.

People by an insane and stupid amount of new stuff. There's no reason that I need too as well, especially when I can find exactly what I want at a fraction of the price. Just last night I picked up a $150 guitar amp for $30.

The TV I bought was $50 and it's the same one my dad bought new ~10 years ago for $2,000.

Personal Anecdote: I am in the Boston area so YMMV - but I love CL. If you are serious about buying selling used stuff it is by far the best place to go. Competitors (FB marketplace, Letgo) have a much lower quality of listings and a much less educated user base on how to prepare, negotiate and make sales. I am not saying CL is not full of spam and junk, but its very easy to spot serious sellers and people who have no idea what they are doing. Over the last 3 years I have probably made 50+ buys/sales on CL and it is still by far my favorite platform.

I use it and it works fairly well. I wish they wouldn't allow on actual stores and spammers.

I recently graduated and moved to a larger city than my college town and I've found that Craigslist is actually worse in the larger city. Less people who respond overall and there's always someone who responds 45 minutes across the city.

You can filter the stores out using “by owner” instead of “by dealer”. Some spammers will have their listings as by owner but... it gets rid of most of them

Sold a car on it ~2 years ago. Offloaded some computer hardware (servers, switches, desktop parts) as well. This was around Seattle.

It is what you make of it. It's barebones and there is a crappy signal-to-noise ratio that you need to work around, but 1) it works, and 2) I got the prices I wanted, in cash.

For a simple, basic site that's not bad. I can only imagine how some full featured app, e.g. "Amazon Community (Powered by AWS)" will data mine me and demand a 2% cut.

The buying experience is better than the selling, and it really matters what the item is.

I've had great experiences buying light industrial/commercial equipment, hobby gear, and even furniture and appliances. Those aren't great items for any sort of scam, and the the sellers tend to be legit.

Clothes, electronics, or anything trendy is a much bigger gamble. You have scams, sure, but consider the type of seller; it's a lot more people hard on cash with little experience in the used market.

The key, I think, is to be quite picky. If a listing looks off, don't bother with it. Same for buyers; if they aren't straightforward, don't bother. And avoid putting yourself in a position for someone to waste your time. Buyer picks up with cash, 100%.

I sold some stuff on CL, but it was really really painful. The worst thing is that once you post, the first 4-8 people contacting you will be scammers (trying to redirect your phone through Google Voice, or trick you into other scams).

It's like putting your hand into a pool full of alligators.

Click the search title only button.

Semi obfuscating my phone number helped a ton with spam

I used to work at the company (Mokriya) that had previously released an "official" CL app. CL's attitude towards apps was funny. I never got it. The lead dev told me they were hard to work with and were against providing APIs. No wonder they got their lunch eaten by facebook and other marketplaces.

Traded a Hank Williams CD for an old canoe once. Looking forward to the future, CL.

Your comment captures the essence of Craigslist of yore.

Somehow it sounds like a fair trade for both of you.

I was hoping the font was times new roman. Still, great they kept it plain looking.

Looks like the default San Francisco on iOS.

It’s crazy that searches for craigslist in the App Store does not actually show the official app anywhere

When a new iOS app is released usually it takes at least a day to appear in App Store search results. (Source: am iOS developer)

My guess is this will self correct soon.

The website works just fine on mobile. Why in the world would I download another app?

Perhaps the app can manage to remember your address and phone number, instead of making you type it in every time even when you are logged in to your account? I dunno just guessing at some improvements they can make.

Love the category menu. Everything still looks like a scam, but now it looks less scammy.

Forgive my ignorance, ( Not from US ) how does Craiglist make money?

Craigslist has a running cost of practically nil when you compare it to most tech companies

Listing some sorts of items costs money. I recently sold a used car and had to pay them a small fee.

Really? I was unaware of this change, haven't sold a car in a while (but have sold several on CL in the past).

I guess the spam level got too intense, which I can definitely vouch for. Lots of not-believable deals that were basically phishing scams.

Job postings cost money too. They definitely rake it in!

Some ads carry a fee. A full listing here:

https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees

People pay to post prominently-placed ads.

Is Craigslist still the way to go for finding a place to rent in the Bay Area? As far as I recall, it was a pretty poor experience, but it was the only place that had the listings.

What's the link to download it on the Play Store?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.craigslist...

(found both these apps via a banner on the mobile website, btw. No press releases that I've seen.)

I’m on the Italian App Store and I just get a “not available in your location” error, which is somewhat galling.

I recently moved and tried selling stuff on craigslist. The amount of spam and shady emails I got was overwhelming. They never figured out how to control that.

On the buy side, it's also getting tots redic.

I've mostly monitored furniture classifications. The "by dealer" sections are all but unusable, with repeat and keyword-stuffed listings. This has been going on for at least a decade. It's bad enough that I don't bother.

The individual sales listings are much more viable.

IMO: Craigslist should start charging for business listings, at least in regions for which spamming is prevalent.

Has Craigslist ever taken investment? It always smelled like a purely bootstrapped company to me...

One of the original owners sold a stake: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/craigslist/investors...

Wow so Craigslist launched a iPhone app — like 5 years too late.

Ionic or native?

Have to sign in just to save a search?

no thanks

Use RSS feeds:

http://septicscompanion.com/blog/2013/12/how-to-monitor-lots...

Why not just bookmark the search?

Mobile computing has finally arrived

It really says something about the iOS App Store that I literally put in "craigslist" as a search term and this app doesn't appear at all in the results.

Better late than never I guess. It's pretty sad how little Craigslist has done to keep up with the times.

If I had equity in craigslist as a employee or investor I would be furious.

Think about how much value has been lost to offerup & letgo because they literally took over a decade to release a official mobile app. There is no excuse besides incompetence and gross negligence.

There should unironically be employee lawsuits at the management.

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