Autotrader Reviews 

Autotrader raised their list price for private seller to $79. I have received 5 inquiries on my car - ALL SCAMMERS wanting me to buy a "car vin report" from a scam website (based in India, according to my research). I have also received 2 offers to buy my car from Autotrader (I did NOT sign up for this) for $11k less than my list price. Are you kidding? So let's get this straight. I PAY to place an ad so that SCAMMERS and AUTOTRADER can scam me. Wish I could get a refund - but alas, they don't have such business practices.

Vehicle ads by dealer on Autotrader is a complete scam and waste of time! You contact dealer about a vehicle listed in your price range and NEVER get a response back about that vehicle, but they have every salesman from dealership contact you about how they can get you in a new car!
They just use the ad to get your email and/or phone number!!!

If i could give them a -10 I would. Using this service was useless. I initially listed my vehicle ad for $3000 less than what other Odyssey's were listed for on the AT site in hopes of getting it sold quickly and never received a single legitimate interested person. Only scammers replying to my ad with all of them having the exact same copy&paste comments. To make it worse, Auto Trader made an offer to purchase the vehicle for $11,000 less than what i actually sold it for. What a scam!

Attempted to sell my car through the site, received nothing but scam messages. It seems this site is overrun with scammers. Sold my car though another online platform.

It's literally scam. They removed my ad without any information and didn't receive a refund. Will forward this case to the next level of escalation.

Horrible company, they want to get in to your private personal information as much information as they can from you don't give it to them. Immediately after posting my ad I got random calls from California even though my phone number wasn't in the ad people telling me to sign up for ivin.com and they would only use that information if they consider to buy my vehicle. Complete scam the whole thing is a scam can't even sell your personal vehicle anymore without being scammed by some supposed legit site beware

DO NOT SELL YOUR CAR ON AUTO TRADER!!!
Nothing but scam artists. Should get a zero. They
take your ad down with no notice or warning and
you lose your fee. Nothing but scammers contact
you- "use my personal email". Not one enquiry on a
beautiful, unique car at a good price. Do not waste
your money. Look at the reviews.

Autotrader is milking fees for website presence and that's it. Scammers will flood your inbox with messages that magically get through the AT message exchange "security" platform advertised to keep you safe. It is all pure BS. Don't fall for it like I did. Within three mins of posting my ad I was contacted by some POS trying to pull the tired, old "need a GW report" scam. Christ, even FB and CL are better than this garbage site.

I put my add is more the 24 h they took my money no add no costumer service forget about them
I don't know how they are still functioning is nothing but a SCAM Unbelievable

Bought a car of them, thinking they had a reputable business only to get scammed by the seller. I was told that Autotrader should be able to help me as they hace a duty of care. Tried to contact them thinking they could be of help but all I got was we will try to contact the seller to get in touch with you to sort it out. We were promised a perfectly working cat and all we got was a box with everything needing replacing. Save yourself the stress and but a car elsewhere. These guys won't do anything if you are scammed by a seller they did checks on.

Wish could give less stars. Bought a car from a private seller, he mentioned it was in good condition and since we were dealing via auto trader we trusted the seller but he sold a faulty car to us literally after 5 minutes smoke started coming out and the repair is costly than the car itself. Called their costumer service as we did not have seller details and they said they can’t do anything. Basically they are letting scammers scam people through the website and give them protection.

Terrible service. They changed their website so that you are no longer allowed to exchange phone numbers or email with prospective buyers in order to speak with them on the phone. They are trying to keep all transactions within their chat ecosystem in order to collect a 1% transaction coordinator fee. It's complete garbage. Avoid at all costs, complete waste of money.

Update June 1: Notice in their response that Autotrader does not deny my stated facts. Nowhere is it disclosed, prior to purchase, that they changed their system and sellers are not allowed to provide direct contact information to prospective purchasers (without agreeing to a test drive through the Autotrader system). It's a scam to get a 1% transaction coordinator fee. I listed a car at $68,000, and I'm not going to give them $680 extra for doing nothing useful.

You pay 75gbp for the add and when you try to renew they have some system issues and it creates a duplicate add and all hang there as processing. Then stupid security team contacts you saying they think you are trade seller so they removed your adverts. Stay away, literally last time I've ever used this scam portal

Auto trader instant cash offer is a bait and switch scam. Auto trader sends an email to you with a seemingly reasonable offer, then a dealer contacts you and offers you a third of that, totally ignoring the auto trader ico. The instant cash offer baits you in, then the dealer low balls you to either low ball you out of your vehicle so they can make huge money themselves, and if that doesn't work, Auto trader wants you to pay them to advertise your car because the free ads don't work so well.
Only the dealers and Auto trader win in this scam so don't bother with the instant cash offer.I

Placed an add to sell a vehicle and all I got was scam buyers. Most were trying to get you to buy a vehicle report or trying to steal the car with a fake cashiers check. I finally closed the add to cut my losses before they got worse.

Reconsider being in partnership with manheim or whatever association you have with them or at least have some minimum standards for them to operate under while being associated with Autotrader. They wasted my valuable time, and I am considering taking action for that time to be charged to them.

I supplied all the details they need for an honest and accurate quote online - may have been 24/11/2023. Manheim or autotrader quoted £22,256 to "lock in" my offer and gave me until the 01/12/2023 to take the offer, which was about 5 to 7 days or so.

When I called them to take the offer on the Thursday evening 30/11/2023 the man on the phone was confused about the time frame i had been given to take the offer. The initial explaining by me took about 1 minute. He then left me on hold to talk to a manager for about 6 minutes. He then came back, took my details and details of the vehicle. After that I was then left on hold for a further 9 minutes or so and finally the appointment was booked for Sunday PM 03/12/2023. In the meantime, i was asked to confirm via email and supply any outstanding finance details. I did so but i am on the 3 mobile phone network and as you may have seen in the news or online, the 3 network went down for 1000's of customers so many, like me were without any phone signal at all for 1 to 2 days. 2 days in my case. When i did receive those emails i responded immediately as mainheim in the meantime had sent an email to say my appointment was going to be cancelled. I started to get suspicious that mainheims standards were poor after my initial call, but this confirmed it for me. I responded to emails, but not once did they say that finances companies can take up to 48 hours to send them the relevant documents. Surely manheim must know this and should have booked an appointment a few days later in the week. The appointment was then cancelled anyway via email. Had I not checked my email then my entire day would have been wasted instead of the part that was. I called them on Sunday morning, the day of the appointment to see what the issue was, and they said that no documents had been received so i immediately forwarded all emails sent with proof attached and was asked to hold the line - i was then cut off. i waited to expect a call back but nothing so i called them to see what was going on. They told me it was cancelled. I then got another call saying it was now ok and that someone would be there in the afternoon.

The guy who came was nice and polite so no issues with him at all. The did his job and after the inspection, photos and drive he said he would call the office and get me the final figure based on the assessment and advised that it could take a while which was fine. About 25 minutes later he came back to say the value was £18,000 and that they would no longer be making any offer at all!!! What kind of absolute scam and disgraceful show of customer service is that! I am fuming that they had all the info they needed for however many days and then this is the result. Lost working hours and lost car value when i could have gone to other companies in the meantime but due to manheim being part of autotrader I trusted the previous integrity I had for Autotrader that this would be a professional deal. How does a car with almost zero flaws go from £22,256 to £18k. Even the man making the assessment was honest enough to say the condition was great with a couple of very minor chips and that it drove great. The man then tried to make unreasonable excuses for the people he had spoken to on the phone. The guy on the phone said that this car was selling at auctions at £18,000 - total lies in my opinion after making calls afterwards to auctioneers and a few friends who buy and sell cars. I had numerous online screenshots, in the days before getting this quote, from 8 different companies that buy cars online, of my vehicle being valued between 23k and 19,800 - retail, private etc. They man who assessed the car said the market had changed! Changed in 5 days!! Absolute lies from whoever he spoke to. So why didn't new car prices drop. Why was I still able to get quotes for £20.723 after he left! Complete shambles and it has damaged my view of Autotrader and especially manheim. Removed my autotrader ad. I won't be using autotrader again and hopefully i can avoid manheim. Will probably leave this message on trust pilot and other sites but will take a few days to see how i feel after my anger has subdued. Worst thing is, as soon as he left, I immediately got in my car and sold my car to a local garage for the same price as I was quoted and they took time to inspect the car!

In conclusion -
Very poor service overall from manheim – autotrader.
Damaged autotrader’s reputation.

bad that you are still dealing with these poor standards.

They had numerous days to make an accurate assessment

Avoid unless you enjoy your time being wasted.

Terrible company. Refuses to ad CARFAX to my listing because I’m not a dealer? Then forces me to use an inferior product that buyers do not care for. Then refuses to refund my money when I ask to remove my ad 3 business days after placing it. What a horrible company. THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT DEALERSHIPS NOT INDIVIDUALS. SCAM. STAY AWAY!

Autotrader.com is more a data collection platform than a site for listing/selling cars. I recently listed my vehicle, a well-maintained Audi Q7. Of the approximately 20+ inquiries I received, 2 or 3 were actually legitimate. The site is largely populated by people trying to scam sellers. Autotrader.com appears to do little to vet potential buyers, but tries to get sellers to submit a driver’s license and photo, among other things. I eventually sold the car on Marketplace. If you want to waste $45 and spend time beating back scammers, Autotrader is the place.

Listed my Bronco last week. I have gotten 3-4 scam inquiries per day. Even though my ad says "no out of state buyers", they're 90% out of state numbers. They ask strange questions. Totally frustrating, totally useless. Site makes sellers verify everything, make scammers verify nothing apparently. Don't waste your time or money here!

Save your money. Scam ! I should call the attorney general on this site. I Did not know I signed up for private seller and must get car inspected at my cost and then a percentage of sale. I paid 49 bucks for this horrible site and sold it on offer up for free with the same ad . What a joke