Tips for selling your car to an online car buyer

I'm a software developer and over recent years I've developed a number of car buying websites so had an advantage when it came to selling my own car. Already having one bouncing bundle of joy, another on the way, my partner and a dog my car was proving a little cramped when it came to family trips but with just months until the little one arrived and with everything else we have to do I just wanted the car replaced fast.

Online car buyers are perfect for selling your car quickly and hassle free at a price you'd probably get if you part exchanged it. Getting the best price however takes a bit of work but before I start I should point out that the offers an online car buyer will make for your car will often be far short of the prices you see advertised by private sellers (indeed it is not often a car in a private sale goes for its advertised price anyway). When you sell your car online via one of the many websites out their you are selling to a car dealer and the car dealer isn't going to give you any more than its trade value.

When someone in the motor trade buys a car from the trade or a private seller they will decide if the asking price for the car is appropriate by referring to price guides. These price guides, which are updated once a month (often on the first day of the month), are used industry wide and are produced by just one or two companies. The prices in each of the guides are usually about the same and often dealers will refer to all the ones they have available. Under normal conditions when the next edition of the price guide is printed all used cars are devalued by a couple of hundred pounds / dollars however from time to time the used car market sees cars appreciate in value, as they did in 2009 and are expected to in 2011 or 2012.

To get the best price for your car online involves getting as many offers for the car as you can. Before you sit down to start going through site after site though you can make life easy by making sure you have your vehicle documents with you, the current mileage of your car and, if you still have any outstanding finance, your finance details (the last statement you received is usually enough).

When you're ready to start getting offers for your car choose a site that will identify your car from its registration first and note down the exact name for the car used on the site & any dates, such as date manufactured and registered. These will help you on sites that are not able to automatically identify the car. Then simply Google sell my car, buy my car or value my car and work through the lists of online car buyers.

Once you have got a good number of offers for your car calculate the average amount offered. This amount is often just less than the trade value of the car. Online car buyers use different tactics to buying cars. Most of the people making very high offers hope to chip down the amount when they see the car and they will do it regardless of condition of the car. Buyers around the average often want to buy cars hassle free and the people making low offers are looking for cheap cars people want to sell fast or to haggle over the price with the owner.

Personally, I just ignored the highest offers, often these people require you to take the car to one of their garages to have someone try and knock down the value and just waste my time. Instead I focused on the dealers making offers around the averages and sold to one of them. However, if you're so inclined, haggling with the dealers that have made a low offer can get you a price higher than what you'd get from just selling like I did.