Selling trailers online: a trailer is not a truck with bits missing

Plenty of dealers who sell trucks sell trailers too, and plenty of websites treat a trailer as a truck with half the form left blank. Buyers notice. A trailer deserves a listing of its own kind.

Leave out what does not apply

A row of empty fields for mileage, engine, fuel and gearbox makes a listing look unfinished. If your system lets you hide them for a trailer, do. If it does not, say “not applicable” rather than leaving a gap.

Lead with the trailer’s own facts

• Trailer type — semi-trailer, drawbar and so on.
• Body — curtainsider, flatbed, box, tipping, fridge, low loader.
• Axles — how many, and anything notable about them.
• Year and identification — so a buyer can check what they are looking at.

Photograph the working parts

For a trailer the selling points are the floor, the body or curtains, the running gear and the coupling. A walk round with a phone in good daylight, covering each of those, tells a buyer more than any paragraph.

Help buyers find trailers on their own

Someone looking for a trailer does not want to scroll past forty tractor units. Make sure trailers can be filtered or listed separately from the rest of your stock, and say “trailers” in the page title.

How MotoVend handles it

On MotoVend, choosing Trailer as the type removes the mileage, engine, fuel, gearbox and cab fields, adds a trailer type, and turns the registration box into a registration or trailer ID. Buyers can filter your stock by type, so trailers are a click away. See MotoVend for truck dealers.