Maybe you’ve been there, too – looking to offload or pick up something particular on Facebook Marketplace, or Gumtree, or Craigslist. The classifieds spool down the page, endlessly refreshing when you reach the bottom: hundreds of little boxes with bike stuff in them, filtered by brand, price, location or The Algorithm.
The more time you spend in this digital river, you’ll start to pick up on some themes – in photographs, or text, or just gut-feel. But they're there, distinct sub-categories of individual that's trying to sell an item in their own particular way.
After extensive sociological study on both sides of the seller/buyer divide, here are the 12 types of people you’ll encounter in the world of bicycle classifieds. Good luck and godspeed, internet shopper.
1. The Wild Overoptimist
Depreciation comes for almost all bicycle things, and certainly products that are modern enough that they haven’t yet swung around to being fashionable again. This category also typically includes limited edition products, sometimes with a tenuous tie to a pro cyclist – at its most extreme this is where you'll find signed, framed jerseys for now-disgraced riders, or former team bikes that have had a rough life of many thousands of kilometres of sweat, spew, racing and crashes.
But you know something? None of that stops this cohort of sellers from having a wildly overinflated perspective on the value of their item or its desirability. Especially if it’s a Specialized Allez Sprint in one of the more outlandish colour schemes.
2. The Thief
Perhaps the most overtly threatening of the buy/sell personality types, this user typically has a profile created in 2025, a pseudonym for a display name, and a desperate urge to offload a bike they don’t actually seem to know anything about.
Bonus points if the photo is taken on public transport, or profoundly out of focus. Or if it’s missing essential stuff, like a front wheel, or is an ebike with no battery or charger. Or if it’s got visible saw marks on the frame, or a blank spot where the serial number should be. When you meet them they will ask for a cigarette and call you a C-bomb, and you will timidly hand over $150 because you are scared of what they will do if you don’t.
3. The Flipper
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