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Earlier whenever someone wanted to sell any regular product, purchase something for their home, finding roommates or dating it was the only option for them to promote the requirements in local ads.
But as technology has evolved in the last few years, the internet has replaced all of the options for ads because everything is online. One of the most recognized classified websites in European countries and the far west is Craigslist that has a similar functioning.
- According to the Traffic Pillar, Craiglist is ranked 65th most visited website over the internet.
The number shows the effectiveness of the website.
- Craiglist has over 7 billion views with more than 20 million unique viewers.
- Craiglist ranks 9th in the 2019 Sellers Choice Awards.
If you are also one of those enthusiasts looking for the options to create a website like craigslist without writing a single code then and it is possible using WordPress and other similar CMS.
In this article, you will closely learn about the efficiencies of Craigslist along with some of its important features that are reliable and can be included on your website.
What is Craiglist?
Craiglist is the region-specific classified website where the customers can find housing, personals, discussion forums, resumes, services, and more.
Most of the advertisement in Craiglist are free to post which speaks the history of Craiglist back to 1995, when it was a not for profit company, which soon converted to for-profit company in 1999. Now the advertisement are charged on the basis of location and region.
Let us understand Craigslist?
Many of the Website development service providers have created a fuzz with Craigslist and a large number of startups are willing to create similar websites.
Craigslist has around 364,140,907 visitors in a month and has revenue of $1B. But considering its amazing features lets have an understanding of its analogy and the reason for which it is highly successful.
Craigslist inbounding the Responsive web design services is a highly classified advertising website that is evenly spread across 68+ countries and 700+ cities.
You will be surprised to know that it was created in the early 1990s especially when the internet was just surfacing globally.
Initially, it was executed by sending a few emails regarding the upcoming event in the year 1995. But it is everyone's responsive attention that people started asking back for the detailed information regarding the events.
The founder of Craigslist, Craig Newman kept passing the emails on various subjects regarding the selling, purchasing and so on.
As time passes by more and more people find themselves attached to the website and then it becomes pretty difficult to maintain the sending. Before this website came to surface there were only a few of the platforms hosting the advertisements but on a payment basis.
The ultimate purpose of creating similar websites like Craigslist is to provide free access to the users to post the advertisement online.
How does it monetize Custom web development services?
As all of the contemporary providers were doing the same instance in an old fashioned way to monetize their business Craigslist Made an effort to take an innovative turn.
During one of the most acknowledged interviews, the founder of Craigslist revealed that initially, he was determined to build an easily available platform that is available for free to the users and so denied allowing the banner advertisements to his platform.
But obviously, as the website is making millions at present, the charges which you can count for your classified advertisement including the charges of selecting any top Asp .net development companies are as follows:
Posting charges
Every user willing to post the advertisement requires paying a certain amount. But this model has some drawbacks because users think that if a model is not successful then why they should pay for it.
The answer to this question is by charging a minimal amount for every ad or providing new users a solution where they can post a number of ads following a monthly subscription. The same instance is also seen in OLX or Oodle and there is a limitation to the number of free posting of advertisements which is determined by the categorization of available listings.
Transaction charges
Following every transaction, the user has to pay a certain amount which is corresponding to make a purchase on the same.
In classified ad websites especially in On-demand solutions, this is not a popular monetization model still, the classified websites have made themselves stable in the past few years things have changed a lot. It is obvious and pretty common to charge at least a minimal amount for every transaction these days. We can consider the example of OfferUp which charges the users a small percentage of the amount for using their platform.
Premium options
Even the Best web development company in the industry provides a set of efficiencies to their customers for overheads like traffic statistics, XML import of the services and products, ability to organized and filter ads based upon their category and so on.
This as a revenue model is basically offered to the startups for small businesses that are required to sell their products on any website under the brand value. Considering this instance the classified ads websites offer enough opportunities to the business to create their value and can easily track their sales.
This monetization model is used by OLX too.
Listing features
For any significant platform, the best Website development services allow Google advertisements or AdSense to post their advertisement on their website following the fees.
Although it is not the only method to get absolute revenues for your business because it might seem spammy for the customers at first. They can also find it pushy and it is advised to combine this model with some other balanced revenue model. For example, Quikr utilizes feature listing methods.
Read the blog- Ultimate Guide to hire cost-effective Web Development Agency
Features of Craigslist that you can consider including in your website
We have seen some of the classified advertisement websites revenue models but analyzing their features as well, it is important to highlight some of the core features that you can include in your platform.
Registration
When classified websites came to the industry in online advertising they did not essentially ask for registration in order to post the ad but nowadays it is extremely required.
You might be wondering why it is vital and the answer is registering on the website allows customers to gain possible access to their personal information where they can easily check for the ad they have posted, other account information and through the communication interface, they can even chat with other buyers or sellers.
Other than that it also allows the websites to enhance the security which is advantageous in terms of marketing campaigns.
This is highly required in Responsive web design services and if you are building from an MVP then you can create a simple registration process. On the contrary, if you are willing to create a fully functional classified website then you must definitely include-
- Access to sign up using Facebook/Google
- Provide access with the phone number or email
- Request passcode
- Provide email confirmation to finish the registration process
You can also include some optional requests like username, country, postcode, etc.
Search options
This might be the first thing that cracks in the minds of users whenever they are on your website and this is the only reason for which the search engine which you have chosen must be fast and capable of delivering clear services.
It is also seen that for classified ads websites, searching and targeting the right audience is most important and it enables them to use multiple searching techniques. You can have a reference to some of the commonly used search options-
- Searching by keyword or location
- Searching by category- whenever the user will search for any page all the search results will appear which will allow him to filter and sort easily.
Sometimes the user migrated to see the most updated details or in a few cases, price becomes a key factor.
Some of the other sorting filters which you can consider are:
- Price charges (high to low or low to high)
- Most recent searches including the latest and oldest options as well
- Popularity columns
- Nearest or farthest
- Option to save the search
- Filtering based upon the type of advertisement
- Ability to set the alerts
If you have not created a sorted website then filtering or searching can get even trickiest. Some of the Craigslist filters are mentioned below:
- Search title only filters
- Including image filters
- Include nearby locations
- Today posted filters
- Bundle duplicate
Product or service page
On this page, the user can easily see the particular advertisement of their choice. it also has the functioning or better says the effect of elements that give access to the users to stay on the page for as long as they want.
Initially, the product page started out to be extremely simple and general having limited information but with the involvement of better Custom web development services the customers get a variety of options. They can either chat which the seller or buyers, can easily view other products, users can view the information of other services and products and so on.
Posting ads
This is the golden feature which you can definitely consider on your website because it will trigger the monetization value of your website.
All have to take care is that the process all throughout its development cycle must remain quick, well implemented and thought-out and simple. You can keep in mind that the posting page must be comprehensive for the users so that they do not find it pushy rather you can be more descriptive with the information to promote them using the website.
If you still have no idea with that then there are some ways mentioned below to do it;
- Present an opportunity for sellers to highlight their advertisement as urgent or updated
- You can also make them choose the variety of advertisement having different promotion plans
- you can even offer them to create any business account on the website for further assistance
- present some additional options to boost the advertisement for any specific period of time
Read the blog- Choosing the Best Front-end Web Development Tool: AngularJS Vs ReactJS
If you have to convince a large user base to promote their products on your platform in order to monetize higher values, then you can definitely consider all of these tricks.
Along with this, you can also confirm for the publication of any advertisement where your platform will send the confirmation email to the user.
Ads moderation
Most of the classified websites allowed the customer or user to report any feature which was defined as inappropriate.
Somehow the difference between websites like Craigslist and other contemporaries is that they check the status of any violation rules. Craigslist instantly abandoned the listing after a period of time also by reducing the cost for its moderation.
Communication
Microsoft .net leverages communication through web services and therefore a large number of Asp .net development services have made it possible to use various communication approaches in businesses.
Craigslist as the most renowned platform allows the users to communicate via email for absolute security as they are encrypted for some security reasons. You can also allow the users to chat on your platform without the requirement of sending emails and provide enough options to the user where they can attach files or letters for absolute convenience.
We are back at square
Approaching the same question again, how to create a website like Craigslist? Well, there are two possible approaches supporting the cause to let us understand each of them in brief.
Out of the box software
This represents a set of already made libraries and pre-installed plugins on the website so that you do not have to deal with the basic technical installation.
Most of the classified advertisement websites are usually written in PHP where some of them also use WordPress. Building the website solely on WordPress can be a better option in order to validate the idea faster and attract larger investments but you must know that this platform is not capable of dealing with large numbers of real users so not all of the classified advertisement websites are built entirely on WordPress.
Advantages
If you are following any theme for creating the website and it doesn't have any specific feature then and you can also purchase a plugin so that the functionality can be extended for your website.
Some of the advantages in this segment are-
- Cost: Paying for any monthly subscription you can easily get a large number of features.
- No essential coding: If you do not have plenty of team members for this project or if you do not possess any technical or coding skills then also you can launch the website.
- The development time for the project: For this project, you will not require plenty of time because it takes comparatively less time than developing from scratch.
Custom development
There is a reason for which custom web development services have remained everyone's favorite be it On demand solutions or anything else.
if you are not certain to build a website just like craigslist then ask yourself the question if you have validated the idea or are you ready to build any long term website. If the answer is yes then custom development is your option as it will enable you to start with all the efficiencies and customize the website as per user requirements.
Advantages from scratch
If you are building from scratch then make sure that you have all the necessary features which you may require because every piece of software which you possess will belong to only you.
- Scalable architecture: If you are developing from scratch then it allows the user or product owner to create a well-considered and planned architecture that is also scalable whenever required.
- Complete customization: Customization not only in terms of design but also show in delivering the ultimate experience and user satisfaction.
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Security features: Personal data remains totally secured including the banking information also.
Hence whenever building a website from scratch you get some of the incredible options for security and protection which you can implement straightforwardly.
How much does it cost?
In order to develop any classified website (especially we are talking about Craigslist), the process can be expensive.
If you are concerned about developing from scratch then it can even get higher in terms of cost hence the startups for small business platforms can drop this idea if they are limited with time or budget.
You have to indulge the Best web development company for the work so that they can efficiently cut down the overall development cost and create a well-designed solution having all the essential features that any classified website may require.
In this way, you will make enough savings and the available features will easily satisfy all the requirements. You can make efforts to develop some additional features so that your website may look unique and stand out from the crowd.
In order to create a website like Craigslist especially with WordPress may cost you around $200 or more. In addition to it, you might also have to pay the annual cost of $80 after the build-up.
The bottom line
The market for advertising websites started to rise a few years ago and it is still evolving at present. It is wise to say that every website trying to involve the features of Craigslist is still in a position to find its niche in the same industry.
If you are planning to create a classified website then try to include some unique features so that a large audience can use it. You also have to be cautious not to skip any significant feature for the website.
