It’s a popular misconception that people only sell used goods or black market concert tickets on Gumtree, but on closer inspection, we found SA’s favourite classifieds engine to be a thriving market place. Check this out:

We caught up with Chelsea, who runs a cane furniture company through Gumtree:

We’ve been using Gumtree for about five months now, since the day we opened. I can’t tell you how much we sell or how much money we make but I can tell you that most of our online business comes through Gumtree.

Our products are hand-made and brand new. I think the cool thing about Gumtree is they don’t charge too much for a premium ad  – I think it’s about R199 – and if you have the right product or service (that people are looking for) then there is no reason why you shouldn’t see your product / service selling well.

We did some investigating and there are tons of businesses operating on Gumtree, selling new products or services.

Go to Gumtree and check it out. Search for ‘accountant‘ or ‘bricks‘ – look at this:

And it looks like searches on Gumtree are only the beginning when it comes to traffic. It seems the online classads site has a fairly high ranking on Google.

We were quite surprised at first when someone told us that our listing was in Google, because we hadn’t (yet) spent any money on Google Adwords. A quick search revealed that our Gumtree ad was in fact listed on the first page of Google – a double score!

We took a little look around Gumtree and found a list of the top searches.

That got us thinking… It can’t be the worst place to start if you’re thinking of starting a new business and wondering what product or service to start?

Check it out here.