WHY I CREATED CARS FREAK
I own CoolCarGuy.com and for 19 years I sold vehicles out of my car dealership that was a “boutique” in Lone Tree, Colorado. I branded myself The Cool Car Guy back in 2005 when I first started selling vehicles professionally. Since 2005, I’ve sold millions of dollars in vehicles and I have watched technology make it easier for dealers and consumers to find and purchase vehicles.
However, advertising costs and expenses to run a dealership have continued to skyrocket. Advertising on many classified sites has gotten way overpriced. If you list just 20 vehicles a month at only $5 a vehicle that adds $100 a month or $1,200 a year to your advertising budget. That doesn’t seem like much, but that’s just on one website!
I decided to create CarsFreak.com and make it affordable and easy to use at just $99 a year for unlimited listings. That’s a deal for any size car dealership or for an individual who wants to sell their own vehicle or get into the classified ad business for cars. I created some other sites under the Freak Sites brand to help keep the costs down and not have to continually raise prices as the site grows.
Cars Freak is not an end all website to replace all others, but it’s simple to use and pretty cool. If you’re wanting a way to earn additional income join the Affiliate Program and help spread the word about our Freak Sites branded classified ads. The digital classified ad market is about $21 billion a year, so there is plenty of money to go around, especially with a $99 a year online advertising product, which is about 27 cents a day to advertise.
Marketplace offers you 5 different types of ads which you can select during ad posting or reposting. It is not possible to switch between different ad types while it is live. Available types are:
- Sell
- Auction (Make Offer)
- Buying
- Exchange
- Gift
There are three file formats used for images: JPG, GIF, and PNG. Make sure your image size when posting an ad is 650 pixels wide with a height of 450 pixels or more. The maximum size of the image allowed is 1 MB.
In order to participate in any auction first you need to register an account. Once you have an account visit any auction and in the sidebar you will notice bidding box. A place to make an offer.
Below input for bid value you will see what is the minimum value you must place. Once the auction is finished and if you’ve won it you will receive confirmation mail. You arrange payment with the seller. Cars Freak is a classified ad website and not a traditional auction site like Ebay or others. We do not manage the transaction, we are simply the conduit to match Sellers with Buyers.
List of all auctions in which you are or have been participated in is displayed on your profile under Auctions.
We have a variety of ways built into our system for people to promote their ads, but we’ve decided to keep it an even playing field for now for all of our subscribers to participate. In the future we may be offering some additional advertising promotions. These features are turned off for now, but here is a list of potential future promotion opportunities.
- Bump Up Ad ( this will update creation date while expire time remains and can be used only once per ad )
- Highlight Ad ( this will make your ad stand out from others in listing )
- Top Ad ( make your add in the first XX positions of listing as well as in it’s regualar listing position )
- Urgent Ad ( display urgent ribon on ad box )
- Home Map Ad ( have your ad appear on landing page )
In the future, once you have selected promotion type and period you can proceed to payment screen. Once the payment is cleared your promotion will be active. Promotion starts from the time when payment is cleared and not from time the promotion is requested.
We highly recommend that you link your ads to your accounts on social media to gain more exposure and share your ads with others to gain more traction for your ads.
From dropdown you are selecting general location of your advert while selecting it on the map you are being more precise. Also if the location search of the marketplace is set to geolocation, people who search by location will find your ad easier. Location Search of the marketplace can also be set as list of predefined values in which case value from the dropdown is being used.
Cars Freak has a “Keep It Simple” advertising Marketplace:
- Subscriptions
At Cars Freak we’ve created a Subscription based advertising package that is $99 per year for an unlimited number of ads.
In order to retrieve phone number of the seller go to the seller’s profile page or any of their ads and you will notice a block with their phone number, if it’s listed or you can email or text them if they are not providing their phone number.
If you wish to start messaging conversation with the seller first create an account. Once you have created your account navigate to any of their ads and you will notice button for sending a message. List of your messages is available on your profile. There you have AJAX messaging system where you will be able to continue conversations.
One of the benefits of our sellers paying $99 a year is that if people have to pay to use the service it will limit the number of “scammers” who prey on people on free classified ad websites. The person must have a PayPal account to join Cars Freak and they have paid $99 a year to use our website.
Check their seller rating from other buyers and sellers.
There are two types of reviews – buyer and seller. First step is to register on our marketplace. Next you need to send a message to a seller. Once the seller responds to your message you will be able to review seller and in the same time seller will be able to review you.
When users visit your profile they will be able to see your overall review , complete list of your reviews and to filter them by type.
Once you post review it can not be changed. Also seller and you have option to respond to review.
If you have found an ad which you want to visit later or contact seller later, etc. you can mark it as Favorite and it will be saved to the list of your favorite ads, which you can access from your profile dashboard.
If you feel that the ad is breaking some rules, you can report it directly from ad page by clicking on the Report button and writing detail reason. Ad will remain active until administrator checks it out. Please provide details, so that the seller can be contacted and the ad can be verified by our staff.
There are many free sites on the Internet. There is also an old saying that is quite true and it is this, “You get what you pay for.” Most free websites are driven by annoying advertising sales to take you away from their websites. They also always have a catch where you pay more on the backend, so it’s not really free is it?
Freak Sites has invested a great deal of time and money to create these websites for people to use as a unique channel driven classified advertising system. We’ve made it affordable for anyone at $99 a year looking to sell on the websites. It’s free for a Buyer, so we only charge the Seller an annual fee to use the website. It’s a freak of a bargain!