I decided to start a business 2 weeks before my grandmother died. I knew I had a craigslist killer idea in my mind but just couldn't think of a name. The week after she died I came up with the name LokaMota .. point being to keep things moving in life. I started coding my ass off just to take the pain away. FastForward to the point I know some will think its an absurd idea to compete with craigslist or backpage, but my thoughts are a lot of people get lost as the sites have become bigger than their purpose. And it's time for something new and fresh, which I know I can deliver. In these past weeks I put together some of my best ideas, and launched the website https://lokamota.com The only problem is that something is wrong or missing. I would love any advice to move to the next step!!! Extra info : Looking for 5k paying members, advertised on Bing / google, twitter page, FB page/group, forum presence, upgrading the site everyday, analytics installed.
Firstly, you should lower your aspirations a bit. You can't compete with CL or BP. Nobody is going to abandon posting on either one of them anytime soon. 1. You need subcategories. (e.g. Jobs: Accounting, Administrative, Engineering, etc.). 2. I'd allow users to post ads without an account. That way they can sort of test-drive your site. There's a reason why you can post without an account on CL or BP. 3. I'd abandon the idea of charging $5 per ad while your site is brand new. Grow it first. Once it gets some traction then you can consider doing that. Nobody is going to pay $5 to post ads on a site that has no traffic. 4. Your site has a fluid design, but when shrink the screen I can't open the navigation. 5. Although the site is fluid it doesn't show a cellphone version on my cellphone. It shows your regular site, just very tiny. I don't think your site is nearly as ready as you think it is. I would try to work on it some more (some of your texts are not vertically and horizontally centered within the divs, there are black vertical lines in the footer that need to be removed, and I would, most definitely, remove that brown background.).
It took me a while to find a listing - I wonder if you need a section on the home page for "latest listings" or "closing soon" My experience in sites like yours is centred around a site called TradeMe which has a virtual monopoly locally. We've bought 3 cars through the site and researched for 1 other in the last 2 years - check out http://www.trademe.co.nz/motors. I can't see how you are going to survive without a smarter search on the site. I don't want to see every car, I want to be able to specify make, model, year, asking price etc. I registered but afterwards wasn't directed to login, back to the homepage etc. Standard wordpress but you need to make it easy for people. Your users aren't going to be tech-savvy. After I logged in I thought I might be able to set "preferred states" to automatically limit my search. I'd also expect to be able to save listings to a watchlist and to be able to report bad listings. The problem with being "late to market" is that user expectations have already been set and you have to meet those expectations on day #1. Along with @qwikad.com I'd also recommend dropping the fees. You can fight for market share using price or advertising or by relying on habitual behaviour and I suspect the only weapon YOU have to compete with is price.