It amazes me how many people will list something for sale on Craigslist without publishing obvious facts like model numbers. There's an upside if you a buyer who compares your price for the used item with the price for a new-but-superior item. However, the downside risk of wasting your time with people who walk away once learning the details of the item seems to outweigh this benefit.
Perhaps the greatest downside is that people like me will determine that the person selling the item is an idiot and apply a discount factor for the risk of even dealing with them.
This might hint at one reason CraigsList still exists as it does. There is powerful signaling built into how people make their listing. It conveys a lot about who the seller is and how the transaction will work.
Some friends who are using OkCupid say that their potential date's use of proper grammar is one of the best predictors of compatibility and that this signal is surprisingly hard to fake, especially in mail exchanges (vs. profiles which could be wordsmithed by a friend).
I'd never thought about the idea that a "better" designed for-sale site where users would be lead toward creating a proper listing would actually provide worse subjective predictors.
Perhaps the greatest downside is that people like me will determine that the person selling the item is an idiot and apply a discount factor for the risk of even dealing with them.