Welcome to bikesales.com.au's private listings. This page is intended to help you get the most from our service. Of course, you can simply enter the data on your bike in the fields as they are presented, then sit back and let the system do the work for you, but there are ways of squeezing that little bit more from your advertisement and thereby increasing the number of genuine enquiries you receive while speeding up the whole sale process.

Getting started

Once you select your vehicle make, model and year, our system will automatically fill in many of the fields for your ad, basing your equipment level on the standard ex-factory equipment list. Try to be as accurate as possible when completing optional parts of the form. This will give prospective buyers a clearer idea of what you're offering and save both you and them from wasting time - and emotional energy!

Features and Extra Items

As already explained, our system will automatically insert in the Features field all those items fitted to your make and model of bike when it leaves the factory in standard form. But check the list: sometimes things get left off, or added on which may not be relevant. Here's how to do it:

a. Click on any item in the Features box that you want removed. It will automatically be moved across into the Extra Items box. Once you are satisfied there is nothing in the list that doesn't belong, you can start adding missing items as follows. . .

b. Click on any item in the Extra Items box that should be included with the description of your bike. You will see these items automatically switched across to the Features box. Only items in the Features box will be displayed in the finished ad.

Short Comments, Long Comments

You will be asked to provide two descriptions of your bike in freeform text fields. The first is for 'short comments' which will appear in the search results, while the second allows you to provide a more comprehensive 'long comments' that will only appear when a prospective buyers calls up the full advertisement.

a. Short Comments: Up to 100 characters (about 20 words). Put down the most important details, such as the fact the bike is in excellent condition, just serviced, full service history, non-genuine extras and so on.

b. Long comments: Up to 2000 characters (around 400 words). There is space here to give a truly detailed description of your bike, but again, start by providing the most important information - information most likely to influence the purchase decision.

In both cases, you have plenty of room, so try not to use newspaper-like abbreviations. Remember, a key reason buyers like using the internet is because they don't have to wade through meaningless or difficult to decipher abbreviations!

Contact details

When filling in your contact details, remember this simple rule, as used by the professionals: you may only get one chance to make the sale. That means the more difficult it is for a customer to contact you, the less likely they'll keep trying, so give them as many contact numbers as you feel comfortable with.

a. Phone numbers: Put yourself in the position of the buyer. Don't give them a contact number that will be answered by someone who has no idea about the ad. On the other hand, if you usually have your mobile phone with you - perfect!

b. Email: We won't publish your email address because it's too easy to get 'spammed' if we publish it. However, you will have provided us with your email address so we can contact you. As a result, we accept email enquiries from interested parties, vett them to eliminate most unsolicited junk mail, and then forward the query to you. Make sure you check your email regularly and respond to the person enquiring as promptly as possible. Any delay lowers the likelihood they will remain interested in your bike.

Price

You know how much you want from your bike, but do you know how realistic that price really is? Put an ad on the site with the wrong price and you'll either be inundated with calls because people can't believe the bargain (and you'll miss out on the price you should have obtained) or you won't get a single call and you'll probably get mad with us! But help is a click away.

a. Use the Check Price with Redbook button to automatically find out what range of prices the industry as a whole uses as a guideline.

b. Run a search through our website for cars matching yours and see what everyone else is asking.

Bike type

Select your bike type from the drop down category list. Choose the category type where the maximum number of people will expect to find your bike.

Photos

This may very well be the single most important thing you can do to increase your chances of success. The professional bike dealers who use our website have found that ads with just one photo of the specific bike are almost 20 times more likely to get interest from a buyer than ads with no photos! It makes sense: as a buyer wouldn't you want to see a photo before investing more time in following up? So if you have a digital camera, use it. If you're doing it yourself, here are a few tips for a better shot:

a. Photograph your bike in even light. Sunlight will create glare and imprenetrable shadows, but a fairly bright overcast day will give excellent results.

b. Shoot the bike from a ¾ angle, preferably the front right or left. This way people can see what the bike really looks like. Also, shooting from adult eye height can enhance the look of the bike. Don't use wide angle lenses though, they can make the bike look truly odd!

c. Don't bother shooting on the highest quality with a megapixel camera. You only need a shot that's 550 X 400 pixels and around 40 kilobytes. We're going to compress your photo to this size anyway, so the quality will be better if you start from here.

d. You can use a scanner to scan a printed photo of your bike too. These can be just as good as a digital shot, but remember to crop the pic and save it in the right size and resolution.

e. Finally, we only accept two file formats: jpeg and gif. These are the formats used by digital cameras anyway, and any graphics editing package should allow you to save any graphic file in one or both of these formats.

Finally, if you want more tips on good Internet photography, click here.

Finishing your advertisement

When you have completed all the data for your ad, click 'Next' at the bottom of the page and you will be given the opportunity to see just how both the short version and the full version of your ad will appear to anyone searching. If you're happy, continue to the next page, but remember you can go back and make changes if you're not happy.

Editing your advertisement

At a later date, you might discover you've made an error in your ad. Don't worry, use your username and password to get access once again and change whatever needs fixing. If you didn't have a photo when you first created the ad, you can place a photo into it at any time during the ad's duration on our site, or even swap a new photo for the one you used initially. There is no limit to the number of times you can return and edit.

Maximising enquiries

Here's the really clever part: when you return to the edit page, we present you with some statistics on your ad that can be used by you to decide what changes might be useful. For example, if the statistics show that a lot of people have been looking at your bike, but you're not getting enough enquiries, maybe the photo needs to be replaced with a better one, or maybe you need to adjust the asking price slightly. Don't be too eager to drop your price but on the other hand try not to be too stubborn!

Getting help

We've tried to make our website as intuitive and simple to use as possible, and most people do find they're perfectly capable of doing everything by themselves. But there's no getting around the fact that creating and displaying a great advertisement on screen can catch some people out. But we're just an email or a phone call away. If you want help with any aspect of using our site, drop us a line: we'll be more than glad to offer our years of automotive and internet experience. Just one thing - we know the internet never sleeps, but we do! Our offices are only open for phonecalls during and a little each side of normal business hours (AEST), but we generally respond to emails within hours of seeing them.