GunsAmerica Moves to Fill Void Left by Facebook Gun Group Shutdown

If you’re a firearms enthusiast and you’re on Facebook, chances are good that you might have belonged to one or more groups for discussing, buying, selling, and trading firearms.  If so, you are probably also aware that Facebook recently waged a misguided war against such groups because they facilitated legal face-to-face sales between members (think ‘online gun show’).  As of now, every gun group that Team GunLink members were in have been shut down and I haven’t talked to anyone who still has an active group (although they may be playing by Fight Club rules).

The shutdown of these groups has left a big void for individual private sellers to advertise their personally owned firearms for legal sale.  There are options such as the GunLink Marketplace and the GunLink Local Boards, where users can post their items that they want to sell, buy, or trade, and we have seen former members of our groups scrambling to start up new sites to replace the groups.  Now, according to their news release, GunsAmerica is tossing their substantial hat into the ring by offering free local listings that allow users to sell their firearms without fees to buyers within a 50 mile radius.  

On March 2, 2016, GunsAmerica, launched a new program to promote both person to person private sales, and dealer sales to consumers at the local level.  It is called FREE LOCAL.  The premise of the program is that all sales with a 50 mile radius, zip code to zip code, will have no posting fee and no aftersale fees.

The new GunsAmerica default homepage shows the FREE LOCAL front-and-center, ordered by date with the newest ads first.  This also introduces a new type of ad at GunsAmerica that will be shown only to local buyers.  GunsAmerica describes the new structure:  “If you are selling a gun locally and you absolutely do not want to pay a fee to GunsAmerica, you will be able to list the gun as LOCAL ONLY.  This is the first choice when you are posting ads, LOCAL or NATIONAL.“

The release says that nationally listed ads will still show up in local searches, and that local sales through those ads are still free, although you will pay an aftersale fee if someone outside of your 50 mile radius buys your item.  The GunsAmerica release lists some additional details about the new free local listing program:

• You may only have 5 FREE LOCAL ads running at one time.
• FREE LOCAL ads expire after 30 days.
• You may renew FREE LOCAL ads twice. This is comparable to a Facebook board where you bump.
• NATIONAL ads will show up in local searches along with FREE LOCAL ads.
• The NATIONAL ads do not expire, so they will be available to local buyers until they sell.
• The local ad search results will always be listed by date, so that even if a local dealer has 1,000 listings, the new ads will always come up first.