dculberson wrote:
I wish they had tried it with $1 per ad first or something, but maybe $1 transactions cost too much to process to be profitable.
I suspect that's true. You'll notice a lot of places that sell small items, and restaurants have a minimum charge for using a card, and the lowest I ever see is about $2, usually more like $5. I don't know what the actual transaction fees are, but I suspect this is the root cause.
I also think $5 is cheap in the face of a car sale, as long as you really are posting it once, as per the actual idea of CL. I'm only basing this on the idea that I and people I know look on CL for stuff; I take it you've picked up a different notion of how people look for cars? What advertising beats the response/$ of a CL ad even at $5?
It should be non-free for both dealers as well as private parties, though maybe private parties could/should be slightly cheaper. It drives me nuts that I can't look once every day or two without having to crawl through every damned ad just to make sure it's not a repeat of one I've already seen (different angles on the main picture, different subject, etc.).
In reply to ransom:
Yeah, you're right about the processing cost. You add the credit card company charges to the added costs in accounting, running the web payment process, compliance. I bet $1 per ad would be close to losing money.
That said, I bet CL chose $5 because it's high enough to deter multiple listings without being high enough to push dealers away from CL. It's a matter of putting an economic cost on bad behavior.
