A standard/basic advert includes up to 3 photographs and a long text field. These adverts appear at the back of the listings for any given category, behind all premium adverts. On more popular categories this will mean your advert will be placed several pages back, regardless of how the user orders the results. To select a standard advert, when you are creating the advert simply select 'Standard advert' at the top of the page.

A Premium advert appears before standard ads in search listings, no matter how results are ordered (even by price, distance etc) premium always gets priority, and you can list up to 9 photos of your car, rather than the standard 3.

All adverts on PistonHeads run for up to 30 days, after which they can be relisted if necessary.

How do I submit an advert?

Private advertisers

If you're new to the PH Classifieds, click here to sign up and create your first ad. You'll be asked to upload photos and for payment (where applicable) during the process, it's all self-explanatory.

If you've advertised with us before, log in by clicking here. If that link takes you to the 'create advert user page', just click the 'log in using a different account' link at the top.

What are your charges?

A basic ad can cost £10. This includes up to 3 photographs (these must be of your own car) and a long text field. These adverts appear at the back of the listings for any given category, behind all paid adverts. On more popular categories this will mean your advert will be placed several pages back, regardless of how the user orders the results. To select a standard advert, when you are creating the ad simply change the selection box at the top of the page.

For £16 you can get a premium ad. These come before basic ads in search listings, no matter how results are ordered (even by price, distance et al, premium always gets priority), and these include up to 9 photos.

How long do adverts last?

All adverts on Pistonheads run for up to 30 days, after which they can be relisted if necessary. Relisting a Premium ad will incur a £16 charge each time.

When will my advert appear?

As soon as we've checked it out, we'll release it onto the site. Typically this will be within an hour or so but we do manually approve some adverts which can take longer, especially on weekends and bank holidays.

When will my pictures appear?

Sometimes pictures can take a short while to show on the site once you've uploaded them. Please allow up to half an hour for your pictures to all be shown.

How do I edit my advert or pictures?

Go to the main classifieds page and click the Manage My Ads link on the left-hand side.

To edit your pictures, log in to Manage My Ads and click the camera icon. From there you can remove existing photos and upload new ones. Remember that for the best chance of success, images should be uploaded to our site one-at-a-time.

Traders

If you're a motor trader, or plan on selling more than six cars per year, you need to sign up for a trade account. Vist our trade site at vdealer.co.uk for further details.

Where is my advert?

Standard Adverts

Our classified system features two levels of advert, standard adverts and premium adverts.

Premium adverts cost £16 and give you 9 pictures as well as placement at the top of the listings. Standard adverts are free, but are placed after all the premium and dealer adverts in the listings.

If you have submitted a standard advert and cannot find it, but it is showing as live in your advert management centre, then it will be on the site but is probably quite a few pages back, especially in a busy category containing lots of premium adverts.

The easiest way to find your advert in this case is to use the filter tool. This can be found at the top of each category next to the ‘List, ‘Gallery’ and ‘Map’ buttons.

If you click on Filter you will be taken to another page which will allow you to search by defining a price range, maximum distance to a postcode or a keyword. This will cut down the list of cars from several hundred to a much shorter list in which your advert should be easier to spot.

Note: Changing the order of the sort using the buttons in the gray bar at the top of the category does not do the same job; it only changes the order of the list rather than cutting it down to a more manageable size. The standard adverts will still be after all the premium adverts however the list is sorted. For example if you change the order to ‘Price: High to Low’, it will show the most expensive premium advert first, then all the other premium adverts in descending price order until the cheapest premium advert, before starting again with the most expensive standard advert.

Alternatively, you can upgrade your advert for just £16 which will allow you to add 6 more pictures and will bump your advert right to the top of the list.

I Still Can't Find It!

It can take up to an hour for our servers to update once you submit an advert, so if you have only just posted your advert then check back later and it should have appeared.

Awaiting Approval

If it hasn't appeared after an hour, log into your manage my ads section and check that the advert is live. If it says 'Awaiting Approval' rather than live, this means your advert is in a queue waiting to be looked over by a member of the PH staff. This is nothing to worry about, it will normally be dealt with within one working day and you will be notified once it has been reviewed.

Email Bouncing

This happens when the emails being sent via your advert are being rejected. Normally this is either because your spam filter is blocking them, your inbox is full or the email address you supplied is incorrect.

You are welcome to reactivate your advert, but you should check there are no problems with your email to prevent it happening again and to make sure you don't miss any replies.

How do I upload pictures?

When you create an advert, you will automatically be taken to the upload photos screen. Just click 'browse' and you'll get a box popping up which you need to use to find the images stored on your computer (please note that we are unable to take images from other websites like Photobucket). You can fill all of the slots available and then click the 'upload' button at the bottom, but you may find you get less errors if you upload one image at a time.

Ooops, An Error Has Occurred

Problems When Submitting Your Advert

If you get an error message when you click to submit your advert, this is probably due to a known bug which we are working to fix at the moment. Until this bug is fixed, you will need to avoid using any special characters in your description. The most common one is the pound sign (£) but some people as also having problems because of angled speech marks or apostrophes (“, ” or ’). These appear if you copy and paste the description from another program such as Word and must be replaced with the standard versions (", " or ')

Problems Adding Pictures

We don't have an enforced size limit on pictures, but if your pictures are too big then your computer might run out of time before it has finished sending them. Because of this we suggest you try to keep your file sizes less than 500kb (0.5mb) per image.

If your pictures are bigger than this then there are several things you can do.

Resize Your Images

All the pictures we receive get resized to 640x480 before they are shown on the website, so there is nothing to be gained by sending pictures bigger than this. If resize your pictures using photo editing software then the pictures will send much faster and should avoid any problems.

Turn down your camera's settings

Choosing a lower resolution/size setting on your camera is a good way to get the files to a more usable size. The bottom setting on most digital cameras (not phone cameras) is perfectly adequate for the pictures that'll go on your ad, and should help you avoid any errors. Again, there is no benefit to using larger images as we automatically resize them.

Other Options

If you don't want to resize your images, there are a couple of options to sidestep the problem. Firstly, you can try sending one image at a time as the time limit is the same for one image as it is for nine and obviously one image takes a lot less time to send. The other option is to try again at a less busy time of day, as this will allow your images to transmit a little bit faster, which can sometimes let images that were struggling at peak times scrape through.

I can't see any pictures

If you can't see any pictures at all in the classifieds then it sounds like you have some firewall or anti-virus software that is stopping the pictures from showing.

McAfee

We are aware of problems with McAfee which cause the problem.

You can fix it by doing the following:

Under Common Tasks, click Home.
On the SecurityCenter Home pane, click Internet & Network.
In the Internet & Network information section, click Configure.
On the Internet & Network Configuration pane, click Advanced under Web browsing protection.
On the Ad, Pop-up, & Web Bug Blocking pane, select the Block advertisements that appear on Web pages when you browse the Internet check box.
Click OK.

This should make all the pictures reappear.

I Can't Log-In

Email Address not Recognised

If you last posted an advert before the 3rd of July then you will need to register again for an account in the new classified system. This will then copy across any old style adverts you may have and allow you access to them.

It's asking for a login name

Our site has two login areas, one for the members area (forums etc) and one for the classifeds. The classified login can be found HERE or by clicking 'Manage my Ads' on the left hand side of the classifeds.

Editing Problems

I've Edited my Advert, but it hasn't changed

Our classifieds take up to an hour to update, so any changes you make will not appear instantly on the site.

What does 'You can only make a few changes' mean?

This is a standard message which appears whenever you try to edit a live advert. Most things can still be changed on a live advert, including the price, description and pictures however it is not possble to change the category that the advert is in.

The price I entered has disappeared

Make sure that when you enter the price for your vehicle, you don't use any special characters or decimals, and don't write 'ONO' or 'OVNO'. If you want to put anything like that you can always write it in the advert description, but the price box should just have a number in it, e.g. 2000 not £2,000 ONO.

How do I relist my advert?

To relist your advert, you must first wait for it to expire (30 days after it was posted). Once this has happened a button will appear in your advert management centre which will allow you to resubmit the advert. We regret that it is not possible to relist adverts as new before this time.

I've uploaded new pictures, but I still see my old ones!

New pictures can take a few minutes to circulate through the site, so you may see your older pictures for a short while as our servers update them. If it takes over an hour, try clearing your browser's cache to make sure you're seeing the most up-to-date version of the pictures as possible.