Anatomy of a listing

A listing is the unit of trade on Haubot. Buyers see them, search them, message about them, bid on them. Sellers create them. This article walks every field in the create-listing form so you understand what each one does and why it's there.

Header — what buyers see first

• Title. A short human description: "2018 Caterpillar 320GC excavator, 6 200 hours, Greece". Avoid stuffing it with model numbers and slogans — it should read like a sentence.
• Equipment brand & model. Pick from the catalog (Caterpillar / 320GC). If the exact model isn't in the catalog, you can type a free-text fallback; we still index it for search.
• Year manufactured. Required for filterability. If you genuinely don't know, list it as unknown — better than guessing.
• Condition. New, Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor. Buyers calibrate price expectations from this.
• Type. For sale, Auction (Direct seller / Haubot-managed), Rent, Wanted. Determines which downstream forms unlock.

Pricing

• Currency. The currency you priced the equipment in. ISO 4217 code (USD, EUR, AED, …). Buyers can switch their display currency; we convert on the fly.
• User price. Your headline price. Required for For sale, optional for Wanted.
• Starting / Buy now / Reserve price. Auction-only fields. Reserve is hidden from buyers; Starting is the opening bid; Buy now is an instant-purchase escape hatch.

Location

Required. Pin on the map (we use Mapbox), country code derived from the pin, city name from the geocode. Buyers care about location for two reasons:

1. Shipping cost. Far equipment is expensive to move — buyers filter by region.
2. Paperwork. Cross-border purchases need export documentation. The location informs whether that's relevant.

You can choose to display only the city, not the exact pin, on the public listing — useful when the equipment is on private property and you don't want unannounced visits.

Photos and videos

Up to 30 photos and a handful of videos per listing. After you upload, our media worker:

1. Generates thumbnails for each size we serve (mobile, desktop, hero).
2. Watermarks the displayed images with your seller name + listing ID. (The original is preserved internally; what buyers see is watermarked.)
3. For videos, generates a poster frame and a streamable web-friendly version.

The first photo is the hero — appears in search results, social previews, the listing card. Make it a clean wide shot, not a corner of the engine bay.

Equipment parameters

Per-category technical fields. For construction equipment that's operating hours, fuel type, attachment compatibility. For aviation it's airframe hours, engine TBO, certification status. Each category has its own schema.

Why fill these in:

• They drive filterability (per-category parameters appear in the search filter panel — buyers narrow on these).
• They signal completeness to ranking. A listing with 9/10 parameters filled outranks a listing with 3/10, all else equal.
• They reduce back-and-forth questions — buyers want hard numbers before they reach out.

If you don't know a value, leave it blank rather than guessing. Don't lie in fields buyers will check during inspection.

Description

Free-form text. The bit where you sound human. Buyers read this last, after the photos and the headline price, and it's where you justify the asking price or explain quirks ("New tracks fitted in 2024, hydraulics rebuild in 2023, paintwork shows wear at the back boom"). We index the text for search.

Markdown isn't rendered — plain text only. Line breaks are preserved.

UnitVault documents

Optional but strongly recommended for serious listings. The vault uploader is part of the create-listing form; you can also add documents after publishing from the dashboard. See How sellers prepare listing documents for the playbook.

Status lifecycle

Internal but useful to know:

• DRAFT — saved but not submitted. Visible only to you.
• UNVERIFIED — submitted, awaiting moderation. Buyers don't see it yet.
• APPROVED_PROCESSING — moderation passed, the media worker is watermarking photos and producing video posters.
• PUBLISHED — live on the marketplace. Buyers can see, message, bid. An auto-snapshot of the vault is created at this moment if there are documents.
• EXPIRED — listing ran past its expiry without sale. Easy to restore.
• ARCHIVED — manually removed by the seller. Not visible to buyers, but searchable history is preserved internally.
• REJECTED — moderation rejected with a reason. The seller can fix and resubmit.
• SOLD — seller marked it as sold or auction concluded with a winning bid.

You move between states from the listing actions in the dashboard. Submitting from DRAFT enters moderation; publishing UNVERIFIED is a moderator action; archive/restore is a seller action.

What separates a strong listing from a thin one

Strong listings have:

• A clear, specific title.
• 8+ photos including detail shots (cab, engine, undercarriage).
• A walkaround video (under 90 seconds is plenty).
• All applicable parameters filled.
• Vault documents attached at the right access levels.
• A description that addresses what's good and what's worn.

Thin listings have one wide photo, a 12-word description and no documents. They sit and don't sell. We don't actively penalise them in search, but we don't promote them either.