Autotrader - Shop & Buy Cars

I am a Realtor who is more than familiar with scams. I don’t trust wires or even certified checks. I don’t trust anyone when it comes to selling a car, but I do trust auto trader. Let me tell you this is a flawless way to sell a car. Autotrader gets the money from a potential buyer and holds it in an escrow account so the funds are verified before you ever meet the buyer. When the buyer comes to test drive the car they arrive with a paper license plate should they buy the car. You just have to remove your plate. Once the buyer agrees to buy your car, they just log into the auto trader account and press “take possession” and that’s it. Money hits your account in a day or two. After that, Auto Trader sends you a envelope with instructions and pre paid envelope to send back your title and whatnot. This is an extra layer of protection. By the time you get your envelope from Autotrader you should have long received your payment and they don’t technically own the car until the title has been signed. The fees are also minimal and very fair. I just sold two cars in the past two months and I am thrilled with my experiences. You should not exchange phone numbers prior to agreeing to test drive. Meet somewhere public not at your home. Police station is perfect. I bring “protection.” To be safe. Autotrader verifies real people by having them upload pictures of their license. They will warn you of potential scammers. The only chance of getting scammed is selling your car off of the auto trader platform so stick to it! Do I sound paranoid? Yep and anyone else that sold on Craigslist will be as well. Hope this all helps

The developers have been destroying the app with each update over the years, to the point where it’s unusable now. I have been a longtime user of Autotrader and have been using it for over 5 years. The old app was the best. When they started to modernize the app, each update introduced new bugs and annoyances. The most recent update that introduced a new interface and a type search feature is the absolute worst thing. It was easy to tap make and model in the old app as it was front and center, but now it’s the search bar. The search bar does not recognize some very common models. For example, I type “S550” it brings up every Mercedes model except for the S550. If you do manage to find what you're looking for, when you apply the filter sometimes it doesn’t work, it shows the entire brand instead of what model you’re looking for. The app has had issues with it logging you out of your account for OVER A YEAR! How ridiculous is that? The newest issue is that, if you do manage to stay logged in, it won’t save cars that you want to save. Instead, it will give you an error. What’s also new is that if you tap on a vehicle to open the listing, it will show a blank screen. The app is literally unusable, in addition to showing us showing ads for this ridiculous performance, the developers and the company as a whole should be ashamed.

I have been using Autotrader for years. The last few times I have used it not only is it glitchy and freeze up, but the quality of the results were not inclusive of many many other results found on other competing websites. Step it up or I will start my car searches where the results can be found. I have also sold a few cars on Autotrader. The last time I TRIED to sell a car I was SHOCKED how expensive it was. Tried it for a few weeks with only a few calls, all tire kickers. I put the same car on another site after a few weeks on Autotrader and we had ten calls in two days and the car was sold within a week. So, again poor results. Autotrader needs to lower the cost to list a car to solve their two biggest problems. 1)Not enough listings 2)because it’s to expensive to list a vehicle. Look, I think Autotrader has been the goto in car searches/selling over the years, but they got too big for their britches! Come back to reality Autotrader and realize you are getting your clocks cleaned cause you got greedy.......