Hi all,
I've been playing and buying/selling banjos for 3 years now, so I'm relatively new to things. I sometimes look at the banjo classified ads on Mandolin Cafe. It looks like their banjo ads are 90% music store listings and 10% individual owners. It seems like Banjo Hangout is the opposite.
I'm not judging the quality of the listings on either site, but I'm curious if anyone knows why music stores post more on Mandolin Cafe for banjos and why individuals prefer banjo hangout.
I've wondered that myself. I rarely look on Mandolin Cafe because I feel the music stores are just reposting their banjos every week. It's very repetitive and boring.
The answer might lie in the number of web visitors per day/week/month. Businesses follow the numbers.
I am not a member of, nor do I read the Mandolin Cafe. There may be different terms for commercial ads on the Cafe that attract store ads. It has never occurred to me to advertise on the MC since I assume my buyers will be banjo players.
Whenever I have looked, it seems a lot of the banjos are cross listed on both.
There was a time when a few retail stores were flooding the BHO marketplace with advertisements.
There were a few threads about the issue, when it was occuring. I don't know why it stopped, but it seems like by and large those retailers are gone now, for whatever reason.
You still do have a lot of commercial operations in the marketplace (and on the forums), and they're not always up front about their connections or motivations with what they post. But that's a totally different issue.
BHO still seems to be the place to sell banjos for the average guy or gal. Not too sure about the retail sector but they seem to always be selling here too (sometimes incognito). The bottom line is you can't beat the 2% sellers fee. One thing to also remember is you are also getting exposure across the web with BHO's sister classifieds like BanjoBuyer.com and BanjoBarn.com
My experience with selling banjos on Mandolin Cafe has not been very stellar (which isn't surprising, it's a Mando site and has limited capabilities) and eBay and Reverb mostly suck money out of your pockets any way they can thus forcing higher asking prices to cover the additional cost.
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