When advertising a car you will be able to add up to 9 photos and can write an unlimited amount of text. All adverts are charged at £9.99 and for this you will be able to advertise your car to 4 million potential buyers making PistonHeads the best value place to advertise your vehicle.

Advertising motorbikes and other items

A Standard advert is free. For this you’ll get up to three photographs and no restrictions on the length of your description. Placing a Standard ad will mean that your advert will be live before the eyes of up to 4 million potential buyers, but we should make you aware that these adverts will be placed behind Premium listings

A Premium advert always appears before the Standard adverts in the search listings, regardless of how the user filters the search (by price, distance etc). A Premium advert always gets priority, a huge benefit in a crowded market, and you can upload up to 9 photographs, 6 more than on a Standard advert.

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.

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 car advert will be charged at £9.99. Relisting Premium adverts in other categories may cost up to £9.99.

When will my advert appear?

As soon as we have approved it, normally within an hour. However, some adverts are manually approved and this can make the process a little longer, especially during weekends and out of office hours.

When will my photographs appear?

Sometimes photographs can take a short while to appear on your advert once they have uploaded. This can take up to half an hour so please bear this in mind when viewing your advert after submission

How do I edit my advert or photographs ?

To edit your advert please visit the classifieds home page. Once there, click Manage My Adverts and log in. Here you will find all the tools you need to amend your advert once live.

To edit your photographs log into the Manage My Adverts section (see above) and click the camera icon. Here, you can remove existing images and upload new ones. We recommend that you upload images one at a time as this can make the upload process run more smoothly.

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 are placed at the top of the listings whereas a Standard advert will appear below both premium and trade adverts.

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.

Standard adverts are best found using the filter tool located at the top of each gallery, here you will be able refine your search to look for private adverts only. In addition, you can filter by price, model or area and this can cut results from a few hundred to a more manageable amount.

You will note that a filter option is also located within a grey bar at the top of each category. This does not offer the same level of refinement and merely re-orders the list rather than filtering to a desired level. It is worth mentioning that Standard adverts continue to appear below Premium regardless of the search option chosen.

If you find that your Standard advert is lower in the search results than you would like, you can choose to upgrade to a Premium advert at any time. This will raise your advert higher on the results page and will also give you the option of adding a further 6 images.

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 your advert hasn’t appeared within an hour, log into your ‘Manage My Ads’ section to check that the advert is live. If the status of your advert reads ‘Awaiting Approval’ rather than ‘Live’ it could mean that your advert is being dealt with by a member of the PH team.
This is not something to worry about, but it could mean a slight delay in making your advert live, sometimes as long as one working day. You will be notified by email as soon as the advert has been approved.

Email bouncing

Occasionally, emails sent by PistonHeads can be rejected by the email provider. Normally this occurs when the spam filter blocks them from entering your inbox, so please ensure you change your settings to allow emails from @pistonheads.com.

Emails can also bounce because the inbox is full; it may sound obvious but it’s worth checking as this may be the cause of your problem.

Please ensure there are no problems with your email before reactivating your advert, as this may stop replies from potential buyers reaching you.

How do I upload pictures?

When creating an advert you will be taken to the ‘upload photos’ screen. To start uploading please ensure that your chosen images are saved to your computer as we are unable to take images from sites such as Flickr. Depending on your choice of advert, you will be able to upload up to either 3 or 9 image,s but we do recommend uploading images individually as that can result in a smoother upload process.

Ooops, an error has occurred

Problems when submitting your advert

When submitting your advert you may get an error message due to the use of certain characters within your headline. Be sure to check for symbols such as £ or & in addition to speech marks and inverted commas.

Problems adding pictures

Although we don’t have an enforced size limit for images, we do suggest that you aim to keep all images below 500kb (0.5mb) as this helps the upload process
When we receive your images we automatically resize to 640 x 840 to ensure they are displayed correctly on our website
Should you find it difficult to take images that are the correct size, consider choosing a lower resolution or images size using the settings on your camera
Other options – remove this paragraph

Most images can be uploaded to the site with no problems, some files can cause errors. Please read the following tips for getting photos onto your advert.

The first thing to check is the file name. It should be as short and simple as possible, with no special characters (e.g. &, *, $, £) and no spaces. It should end with .jpg and NOT .jpeg or any other extension - only jpg will work.

Often pictures don't upload properly because they are above our recommended size limit of <500kb. Larger files take a long time to upload, and most browsers time out before the upload has completed.

Try submitting just one picture at a time (rather than all of the slots at once).

If that doesn't work, you need to set your digital camera to a lower resolution/size setting and submit the new pictures.

Alternatively, if you're a dab hand with imaging software, try reducing the size of the image files by lowering dimensions or resolution.

I can confirm that at present there are no problems with our picture servers, so the problem is not coming from there.

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 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

It may be that you are suffering due to a firewall or some anti-virus software and it’s worth checking your settings. If you are using McAfee then we do have a solution for you:

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.

I can't log in

Email address not recognised

If it has been a while since you last advertised with us, you may need to register for an account again as the classified system was updated a few years ago. Once you have re-registered we will copy across any old style adverts you may have so you can access them as normal.

It's asking for a login name

Our site has two login areas, one for forum members and one for classified adverts. The classified login can be found HERE or by clicking 'Manage my Ads' on the left hand side of the classifieds home page.

Editing problems

I've edited my advert, but it hasn't changed

Our classifieds can 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 but please note that it is not possible to change the advert category

The price I entered has disappeared

Make sure you don't use any special characters or decimals when entering a price within an advert – as an example write 25000 not £25,000 ONO. Also be aware that we do not accept phrases like 'ONO' or 'OVNO'. Comments like this should be written within the advert description.

How do I relist my advert?

To relist your advert, you must first wait for it to expire (30 days after it was posted). At this time you will be offered the option to resubmit within the advert management. 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 site.

PhoneSafe problems

Reseting PhoneSafe

If you find you PhoneSafe number is not working or is going through to its default setting (the speaking clock) it can be reset.

To reset it and get a new Phonesafe number, simply complete the following steps:

1) Log in to Manage My Ads and click Edit on your advert
2) Untick the Phonesafe box
3) Scroll to the bottom of the page and click 'Update'
4)When the page reloads, scroll back to the Phonesafe box and tick it
5) Scroll to the bottom of the page and click 'Save and return to management centre'

This will reassign you a new Phonesafe number.