How it works

How buyers get hold of you

Through the site. You never have to publish your phone number. When someone is interested they press Message seller on your listing, and the conversation lives under Messages in the menu. That is deliberate: your number stays yours until you decide to share it.

We email you when someone first messages you, so you do not have to keep checking. After that first email the conversation carries on in Messages without further emails, because a back-and-forth chat would otherwise fill your inbox. The bell at the top of the site shows every new message either way.

If you would rather not get any emails, you can turn them off under Profile → Email me about offers, sales and alerts. If you do, check the site now and then, or you will miss buyers.

Once you are talking, you are welcome to swap numbers and carry on over WhatsApp. Plenty of neighbours do. Just be aware that anything agreed off the site is between the two of you. We can only see what happened here if something later goes wrong.

What other people can see about you

Anyone, signed in or not: your display name, your profile photo, your "about" text, and your listings. Treat all four as public.

Only neighbours who are signed in: your street address. It is never shown to someone browsing without an account, and it is never posted to search engines.

Nobody, ever: your email address and your phone number. We do not display either, and we do not pass them to other users.

Your address is optional. You can leave it blank, change it, or clear it at any time under Profile. Nothing about listing or selling requires it. It is there only so a buyer arranging a collection knows roughly where they are heading.

Which areas this covers

Silver Lakes Marketplace serves Silver Lakes and the surrounding suburbs and estates of Pretoria East. It is deliberately local: the whole point is that a handover is a short drive rather than a courier.

You are not restricted to buyers inside your own estate, and you and a buyer may well live behind different booms. If one of you needs to come through the other's gate, agree the access before you set off. In most estates the person being visited generates a code for their visitor, but every estate does it differently. There is more on that under Community Guidelines.

Paying, and what it costs

Right now every sale is arranged directly between the buyer and the seller, by cash or EFT, and we charge nothing at all. No listing fee, no commission, no service fee. Money never passes through us.

Card payment is being built and is not switched on yet. When it arrives it will be optional per listing, the item price will go straight into the seller's own bank account, and a service fee will be added on top of the asking price for the buyer, so a seller still receives exactly what they asked for. None of that applies today, and we are not promising a date. If you see a mention of a service fee anywhere on the site, that is what it refers to.

Getting a listing seen

Add photos. Listings with photos sell considerably faster than ones without, and a clear photo of the actual item beats a stock picture from the internet every time.

Be specific in the title. "Asics running shoes, size 6" tells a neighbour more than "shoes". Say what is wrong with it as well as what is right; honest wear costs you nothing and prevents a wasted trip for both of you.

Listings are hidden automatically after 45 days if they have not sold, and we will nudge you at 30. If it is still available, set it back to Active from My listings and the clock starts again.

Changing your mind

You can edit or delete any listing from My listings, and edit or clear anything on your profile at any time.

To delete your account entirely, email support@silverlakesmarketplace.co.za and we will do it by hand within 30 days. What is kept and what is removed is set out in the Privacy Policy. In short, your own material goes with you, and records of money and of reviews you wrote about other people stay, with your name taken off.

If something goes wrong

Report a listing or a person using the Report link on their listing or profile. Reports reach us directly. If you believe you have been defrauded, contact your bank and, where appropriate, the SAPS and your estate security. We can remove an account and show what happened on the Platform, but we cannot recover money that changed hands between two people.

Anything else at all: support@silverlakesmarketplace.co.za. It is two neighbours reading that inbox, so give us a little time.