Whether you’re searching for concert tickets, roommates, microwaves or a red tail boa constrictor, Craigslist.org can help.
Craigslist.org features more than 150,000 classified listings, ranging from jobs to personal ads to housing. It includes listings in 23 major cities in North America and the United Kingdom.
The San Francisco-based website was created in 1995 as a place to post local event listings going on in the Bay Area, according to the site. Nowadays, the site receives 100 million page views per month and was recently ranked as the number one most efficient United States job website by The Wall Street Journal.
Listings are free and can be posted anonymously by anyone with access to the internet. There is no ‘middleman’ in transactions and it is ‘pretty much person-to-person,’ according to Marcia Estarija, Craigslist Foundation spokeswoman. Estarija said the company rarely receives complaints from customers; each person takes responsibility for his or herself when they buy or sell a product or service.
While the site has not tracked its user demographic, Estarija estimated many college students and 20- to 30-year-old ‘hipsters’ use the site.
College of Communication senior Nellie Wu said she and some of her friends used Craigslist.org in September to buy furniture for their apartments.
‘It is really easy to use and they update listings every day,’ she said. ‘[The site] is really good for people to buy furniture, books, anything.’
However, Wu said the listings are not always as clear as they could be.
One unidentified Bostonian was successful in fulfilling an unusual request through the site, Estarija said.
‘I’d been looking for a red tail boa for a week,’ the man said in a testimonial. ‘Everyone who’d been giving away pets had already found them homes. I posted an ad offering to take in any snake, preferably a boa. I was contacted within five hours of posting and picked him up the next day – along with two rats for breeding – all for a total $85 less than two hours away.’
Estarija said Craigslist.org is most popular in and around the Bay Area in California, but the site is still growing and will include a few more cities in the future.