Cars & BidsReviews of carsandbids.com

Awful website. Buyers don't pay if they don't like the price, sellers don't sell if they don't like the price, and it's up to the buyer and seller to do everything. What do you get for your 4.5%? Some nut like the community manager Zach that will ban you for no reason.

Cars & Bids has 29% 1-Star Ratings and is not a good company to work with and are misleading to customers. I would not recommend doing business with them if you have a vehicle to sell. They not only sell, recommend, make profits from charging you for professional photo shoots, you pay for a full mechanical inspection. They also do not disclose the fact that they will only list your vehical once in a year. This means if your car does not sell during their less then a week auction, you are out of luck and $500 plus in the hole. When I questioned their customer service with the fact that they did not let me know I could only list my car once, which would've changed a lot as far as my listing when they approved my Reserve Price that was not close to being met after they compared it to other Cars & Bids most recent sales of my same vehicle's (Bentley Flying Spur) year, mileage and the shape it's in. I was asked to spend $500 before my car was even listed, spent a lot of time having these items completed, and now they tell me I only had one opportunity to have my car listed on Cars & Bids. Stay away from this company and their dishonest business model that does not disclose their auction limitations rules. They say they have the one auction only rule as a policy somewhere in their fine print that they don’t disclose, however it we never discussed or brought up after a month and a half of information exchanges.

The sign up password rules are riduculous.

I was recommended C+B as a place to get a good car with a lot of scrutiny. I watched a lot of bids and finally decided to bid. 1) I wanted to get a car for my son and bid HARD to win a Mazda Rx I really wanted, but got bid out after a long back-and-forth. I lost and within a few hours was told the other bidder cancelled their bid and if I wanted the car. A bit suspicious, I considered offering my lowest pre-bid up offer an ultimately got suspicious of why the first person bailed. I became worried there was something wrong with the car (why did the other guy bail??) I said I would buy it if I could get a compression test (rotary engine) before I bought it and C+B said they were closing the deal as I should have done my due diligence before. The SAME GUY listed the car again 3 days later AND GOT THE COMPRESSION TEST. Unreal. We could have made the deal and both of us would have saved the hassle..why would they BREAK a sale that was going through and both parties were fine with it?? Ugh 2) Excited with the prospect of buying a new car for myself, I decided to list my car and uploaded ~20 photos and was waiting to hear back from them if it was accepted. At the same time I saw another car for my son and bid early on it (low bid) and immediately after realized the car was not a stick-shift (looked like it in the pictures and I thought I had filtered) I made a comment asking if I could retract my bid as I had made a mistake. The seller messaged me that it was fine and not a big deal (over 48hrs before the end and was a low bid. I went back to work. then...it got crazy for no apparent reason. At the end of my work day I saw my email had blown up with > 6 emails from C+B asking me to log in to see their response regarding my car for sale and other emails from a "community Manager", Zachary Hill. When I saw them all, I figured they were about my listing so I tried to log into my account to read the messages about it but my account "was disabled". Confused, I wrote to the help line for guidance and help logging on. Zachary Hill Wrote me and passive aggressively told me to respond to the other emails (instead of just telling me). I picked one of the "log in to see your messages" and wrote back but it bounced back because it was from a no-reply. Frustrated, I emailed the help line again saying I couldn't reply as they were unmonitored. ZH then emailed me telling me to find his other emails...I had no idea what email I was looking for as I now had emails from customer service, no reply bounce back, notices to log in to read my messages about my car I was listing and buried in there were some from him about my mistake. (Why he didn't just say something in either of those messages instead of demanding I read the others is beyond me) Ultimately found one from him directly (demanding I respond to his previous email sent a few hours earlier- I mean not everyone sit at a desk reading emails!!) He then berated me that if I didn't swear to pay if I won he would keep my money and close my account and would refuse to let me check my messages on my car for sale. I told the guy that the seller said it was fine. He said it didn't matter and I had to agree to pay for the car. I told him I wanted to get in my account to check on my sale but he would not unlock my account. At this point multiple bids negated my low, and erroneous offer, but he persisted that I had to swear to pay if I won (even though it was not an issue anymore!). At this point this guy took all the fun and excitement of bidding for my son's car, and I couldn't imagine the pain he may cause if I were to try and sell my car. I was deflated and just wanted Zachary to go away. Of note: I had fully intended to pay the buyer fee if it did go through (my dumb mistake), but just like the last guy that backed out on my bid, I wasn't buying an automatic car AND I wasn't going to lie and say I would. I made a mistake and would pay C+B the fee. Finally I told him to just delete my photos I uploaded for my car and I would close my account. He instead responded that I was BANNED and said my photos would be "archived" and not deleted! In summary: 1) Beware you may get bid up by people on the site multiple times and mysteriously C+B will offer you a chance to pay the higher sum after others don't buy it. 2) C+B will not let you work with a seller in any way. They will both actively block you from communicating with them to make a sale, and/or aggressively email you repeatedly (expecting an IMMEDIATE answer) or they will shut down your account and BAN you for asking a question. 3) Zachary Hill has no business emailing anyone as he is a prepotent, passive aggressive guy who is not on anyone's (seller/buyer/C+B) side. He just bullies people around and is obstructive to buying/selling and ruins customer satisfaction. 4) If you upload pictures of your property but don't sell with them, they'll keep all of your pictures and ban you so you cannot access or delete them!

No seller protections, the sell- through rate is overstated, and the buyer pool is not strong. The winning bidder for my car was allowed to back out of his bid for a minimal penalty, the second, third, and fourth highest bidders all declined to buy at their own bid prices. This leads me to believe the quality of the bidders is very poor, populated with keyboard warriors and the site has yet to come up adequate vetting or deposit mechanisms to protect everyone. While cars and bids has offered to split the fee charged via credit card to the would be buyer, they will only do so if the card charge is not challenged by the bidder. So hedging their bets instead of offering customer service. Finally, even though no transaction took place and the car is still mine, they will continue to show it as sold because the auction ended with a winning bid. Extremely misleading and could complicate my efforts to sell in the future.

C&B is more on the seller side than buyers. Won an auction of a car that seller mentioned there were front end damage but repaired and have clean title in hand. However, after further checking the car was in serious accident with airbag deployed and repaired by non-certified shop out of CA, huge red flag that car still got clean title. The serious accident wasn’t listed on the ad, it was mentioned in the comments section which I did not pay attention to. Seller showed me the clean title however, in CA if airbag deployed it will not be clean title. Apparently, C&B told me it’s my responsibility to check car history and details, including comments section mentioned by others. Comments section should not be buyer’s responsibility, as it should be seller/platform’s job to make it transparent. I am aware of the front end damage as mentioned, but with airbag deployed, it should be mentioned, especially it’s out of state. Imaging I bought a car then later became salvaged and CB/seller will not be part of it. Ended up losing the buyers fee for this auction and been banned from the website. Big fan of Doug but disappointed to his team.

You have made something supposed to be so easy, very complicated even though I did everything asked of me. There were a lot more people interested in my listing that unfortunately missed out due to the time of the listing, etc. The reserve price was not met, and the highest bidder did not want to come up to meet the price. The Cars & Bids team has given no options for me to move forward even though there have been multiple parties that have shown interest when the auction closed. Then to boot when people would like to contact me about the vehicle there is no option to do so on your site. It is not a legit community where one person can interact with another. This is only allowed under conditions they are vague about. I would have liked to take a different course of action to get this issue resolved and time will tell if you actually take feedback to meet customers' expectations instead of disregarding feedback and not being clear in your policies and procedures.

The buyer paid a good price but then gave me a cashiers cheque which he stopped payment on. I tried to relist my car but the site would not let me.