Selling your Personal Number Plate Exploring the Cons of a DIY sale

Well, of course we are bound to recommend our own sales services aren’t we, receiving all the benefits described in our seller’s area, for free!

Plus of course there are other options, but one thing’s for certain, the DVLA won’t buy it off you, or sell your personalised number plate for you, as its not within the Governments’ policy to do so.

So, you’re thinking of going it alone to maybe get more for it, or for a quicker sale perhaps?

Before you do so it’s best you consider asking yourself these important questions:

1. Where will you post your private plate advert and what will you have to do, to prove you own the personalised number in the first place?
2. How happy are you to sell a valuable (and specialised) item to a complete stranger, which will involve sharing your private details and documents?
3. How confident are you that once you have agreed on the price, your buyer will pay up?
4. How will you decide on the right price and what is your advertising budget?
5. How will you know if active buyers are viewing your number plate and how many of them are out there?
6. How will you make sure that you don’t hand over the legal rights to someone else, before they settle up with you?
7. What methods of payment can you accept and how safe are they?
8. How happy are you to discuss offers and negotiate with buyers looking for a bargain? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers and there’s a lot more to think about than you might at first imagine.

Let’s say for example that you are considering using eBay and you feel quite confident, because you or your friends have used it before…. it’s one of the biggest and most successful marketplaces in the world after all!

Once you have prepared your listing and created a suitable image of the actual number plate (don’t forget the legal spacing or else you are misrepresenting your plate in the advert and falling foul of Trading Standards and Advertising Standards Agency laws!) you then need to consider your price and the sellers fees, ranging from 10% upwards.

Next, you might think it’s a good idea to prove you own the registration number by displaying an image of your DVLA holding certificate or vehicle V5 logbook, showing the plate on your car, right?

Wrong! The DVLA actively advises that you keep these documents to yourself and do not display them online, anywhere. Why? Because fraudsters can use your images to clone your vehicle, reproduce forgeries of your real documents, or simply transfer your private plate to themselves without you even knowing!

Okay, so you didn’t accidentally post images of any government documents… Phew! Now you’ll post your advert and sit tight… So how long will you wait?

eBay is a great market place for most easy to understand and recognisable products, but how does it fare in the specialised world of private number plates?

Not very well unfortunately… eBay is not famous or well-known as a marketplace for private car number plates. The majority of searches into Google or other well-known search engines for ‘private plates’ seldom turns up any listings on eBay at all.

Instead you will get to see specialist firms like ours and the DVLA.

eBay just doesn’t spend any money on advertising its smaller product categories in search engines, so listings are very difficult to find, meaning your number plate is hard to find too!

In contrast, we get over 100,000 brand new visitors looking to buy private number plates every week and sell thousands of them for sellers like you.

That’s why we spend many hundreds of thousands of pounds every year in advertising and promotion.

Anyway, let’s say someone does find your plate for sale on eBay and decides to act on an impulse making a reasonable offer, no haggling or messing about. Great! now how do they pay?

Do you offer finance? … of course not! Can I pay by instalments? no thank you!

Paypal it is then, but did you know that a buyer can pay and then unknown to you claim their money back after you have released your documents to them?

Yes, they can, and what’s more they can even use the hacked Paypal accounts of unsuspecting people to pay you. By the time you’ve realised what’s going on they may have even have sold your private reg onto another innocent person who has it sitting pretty on their vehicle!

So now you’ve lost control of your valuable personalised plate and you have no money to show for it. Time to call Action Fraud and the DVLA to try to sort out the disaster!

But wait! What if it’s an honest buyer and they have the money? How do you conduct the sale whilst preserving your own privacy?

How do you transfer ownership to them without sharing details of your DVLA documents, or your own name and address, they are still strangers after all, aren’t they?

Well the truth is unfortunately its virtually impossible for you to retain your privacy, or your security.

So, there you have it, the DIY selling route on the most successful private sellers’ platform in the world so far.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, there is a much more secure and trouble-free alternative!

Not only will we advertise your private plate for FREE, 24 hours a day and 365 days per year, but we will negotiate the sale for you to get you the best possible price and secure your buyer’s funds as soon as the deal is struck and put them on safe deposit until the DVLA have confirmed that the transfer of your private plate has been successful. All this, at no cost to you!

Our payment guarantee also encourages buyers to safely buy from us too, because believe it or not, there are unscrupulous sellers out there, who as mentioned above, sell forged documents for private plates that don’t even exist, or belong to someone else, on eBay and elsewhere!

Understandably, this makes many people reluctant to buy privately. 😢

For the safety of both parties, we recommend using a trusted, and fully registered intermediary, for a secure transfer of funds and goods.

At Plates4less we can provide this service as well as offering free advice on all the other aspects involved in the sale, purchase, and transfer of private plates. You can even advertise your plate privately if preferred and then use us once a buyer has been found, if you wish.

But why not let us find your buyer for you as well? You can advertise your registration mark with us, absolutely free of charge and with the peace of mind that the entire process will be carried out professionally and securely from beginning to end.

So why risk the pitfalls of going it alone? Sell your private plate safely with Plates4less.