Case study · Auto dealers · For sale · September 10, 2026 · 4 min read
The used-car lot that gets 30 leads a week from Craigslist
When Facebook Marketplace shut off dealer inventory feeds, one independent dealer went back to the oldest classifieds on the internet. What he posts, what it costs, and why he still bothers with Marketplace too.
The dealer asked us not to use his name or his lot's. Everything else is as he told it.
Ray runs a sixty-unit independent lot on a four-lane road outside a mid-size Southern city. Trucks, mid-size SUVs, a few sedans under $15,000. He's been selling cars for twenty-two years and has watched every "free leads" channel arrive, get crowded, and get expensive.
Facebook Marketplace was the one that stung. For a couple of years his inventory-management software pushed every vehicle to Marketplace automatically. Then, on September 13, 2021, Facebook stopped distributing partner inventory feeds to Marketplace, and in January 2023 it disabled the dealer listing feature entirely. Dealers were left with two options: have employees post cars by hand from personal profiles, or pay for Automotive Inventory Ads.
"Overnight the feed was gone," Ray says. "My BDC girl was typing in VINs one at a time on her lunch break."
Back to Craigslist
Ray had mostly abandoned Craigslist years earlier, when the site started charging dealers to post. Plenty of dealers did; one industry veteran on the DealerRefresh forums remembers that when Craigslist switched to pay-per-post, it "became clutter-free overnight". The dealers who stayed got a quieter section and buyers who were still very much there.
The fee is small. Craigslist charges $5 per cars-and-trucks post by a dealer in the US. Ray's math: fifteen new arrivals a week, one post each, seventy-five dollars. "I spend more than that on the coffee machine."
What he posts
Ray posts every unit the day it's front-line ready, and reposts the ones that haven't moved after their first run expires. Each ad is boring on purpose:
- Year, make, model, trim, and mileage in the title — nothing else.
- Real photos: front three-quarter, rear, dash with the odometer showing, both rows of seats. Twelve to sixteen pictures.
- The price. Not "call for price." Craigslist readers skip ads without one.
- Title status, transmission, fuel, drivetrain, and color filled in properly, because buyers filter on them.
- Two sentences about the car, the lot's address, and a phone number marked OK to call and OK to text.
"The ads that look like a dealer wrote them get skipped," he says. "The ads that look like somebody's uncle wrote them get calls."
The numbers
Ray tracks leads by asking every walk-in and caller where they saw the car. For the last quarter:
| Channel | Leads / week | Cost / week | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Craigslist | 28–34 | $75 | 15 posts, reposts included |
| Facebook Marketplace (manual) | 12–18 | staff time | "Is this still available?" then silence |
| Third-party listing sites | 20–25 | $1,900 | Best for financed buyers |
Craigslist leads skew toward cash buyers and trade-ins: people who want a truck this week, not people comparison-shopping across six sites. They also skew local. "Nobody drives two hours off a Craigslist ad. They drive fifteen minutes."
He hasn't given up on Marketplace. The manual listings still bring walk-ins, and a couple of dealers on the same forum reported that with a real person answering chats, Marketplace outperformed their paid listing sites some months. But Marketplace requires an employee to post from a personal account and babysit the inbox. Craigslist requires an ad and five dollars.
Where it went wrong
The first month, Ray's BDC posted the whole lot in one afternoon: sixty ads, one account, one office connection. Within two days most of them vanished from the listings without any notice — the site had quietly hidden them as bulk posting — and the account started demanding phone verification on every attempt.
The fix was pacing and separation: a few posts a day, not sixty; one verified account that only posted for his lot; photos re-shot instead of re-uploaded from the feed; and titles that didn't all follow the same template. When the volume got beyond what one person could pace by hand, he handed the posting to a service and kept the writing in-house.
What he'd tell another dealer
"Don't post from the dealership Wi-Fi with a fresh account and sixty cars. That's how you get invisible. Post like a person: a few a day, real pictures, a real number. And put the price on it."
Scale Classifieds posts your inventory the way Ray's team does — a few units a day, from our own verified accounts, with the vehicle details Craigslist's form asks for filled in properly. It costs Craigslist's $5 dealer fee plus $15 per post. Post a vehicle, or read how it works.
Sources
Post it once. We'll put it everywhere.
Craigslist's fee + $15 per post, any of 413 cities, live within 24–48 hours.
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