The Couch That Sold Twice (Sort Of)
You listed the sectional on Craigslist three weeks ago, had two people say they were coming to pick it up, neither showed, and now you cannot remember if you updated the price or if the original post is still live. Someone texted this morning asking if it is still available. You have to go back to Craigslist, find the listing, check if you posted it in the furniture section or the household section, read your own description to remember what you were asking, and then figure out if the price you quoted verbally to the person who texted matches the post.
Selling a household full of items — a move, a downsize, an estate — is a logistics problem that most people manage with a combination of browser bookmarks, text messages, and memory. None of these are queryable.
Three Prices and a Status Pipeline
The pricing structure here runs three levels: Asking Price (what you want), Lowest Price (your floor), and Sold Price/Trade Value (what actually happened). Most sellers know their asking price. Most have a mental floor they will accept under negotiation. Almost none of them write the floor down anywhere — which means when someone texts at 10 PM asking "would you take $40 for the lamp?" you have to mentally reconstruct what you decided you were willing to accept.
Having Lowest Price in the record means the floor is explicit and stable. You decided $50 minimum when you were thinking clearly about the item and wrote it down. When the negotiation happens at an inconvenient moment, you are not recalculating from scratch.
The six-stage Status field captures where each item is in the pipeline: Not Posted, Posted/Not Sold, Purchase Pending, Sold and Gone, Sold and Pending Pickup, Lost Cause/Give Away. The distinction between Sold and Gone versus Sold and Pending Pickup is the status that prevents a second sale: filtering to Sold and Pending Pickup tells you exactly which items are committed to a buyer who has not yet collected them. Telling a new inquirer "sorry, that's sold" is only accurate if you know which category the item is actually in.
Craigslist URLs as Operational Links
The Craigslist Post URL and Edit Post URL fields are the record-keeping detail that most sellers wish they had thought of three weeks into a multi-item sale. The post URL lets you send a buyer to the listing without reconstructing the search. The edit URL — the one that takes you directly to the management interface for your own post — is the link that disappears from your browser history the moment you close the tab, and that requires logging in, navigating to your account, and finding the specific post among all your other listings every time you want to update the price or mark it as sold.
Storing both in the record means any update — price reduction, status change, photo refresh — is accessible from the item record directly, without any navigation overhead.
The Condition Rating and What It Actually Decides
Condition as a 1-5 star rating does double duty: it informs your asking price when you are setting it, and it informs your description when you are writing the listing. An honest 3/5 condition rating tells you to photograph the wear honestly and disclose it in the description, which prevents the time-wasting no-shows from people who expected "good condition" to mean something different than what showed up in the photo.
The Receiving Party field as a contact record captures who the buyer was. This is the record that answers the question three months later when you cannot find your own Craigslist messages and someone contacts you asking for the manual that came with the item you sold them — or when you realize you gave away the wrong item and need to track down the person who picked it up.
When Explanation as a text field handles the scheduling complexity that a simple datetime field cannot: "buyer coming Saturday morning, will call 30 minutes ahead," or "meeting at Target parking lot on 5th, not at home address." The datetime captures the commitment; the text captures the logistics.