Time to sell your food unit? In this post we will explain how to submit and sell your used food truck, trailer, cart or other mobile food unit online through FoodTruckEmpire.com. Click here to list your truck for sale after reading our advice for creating a listing that gets more prospective buyers interested in your vehicle. At FoodTruckEmpire.com we don’t take any commissions so listing here will retain more profit for you after the sale and is easy to do.

Providing detailed information and photos about your vehicle will help ensure your listing is approved quickly and give buyer’s all the information they need to reach out to you. This post will help ensure you’re putting together all the details you need to create an awesome listing that will help your unit to sell quickly. Press play on the video below for a video walk-through of setting up a listing.

Anyone can publish an engaging listing on our website, but the biggest mistake we see people make is not providing enough information about their vehicle. When you start to list your food truck or trailer, put yourself in the prospective buyer’s shoes and ask, “What information would I want to know about this vehicle?” If you approach the sales process with the buyers need in mind, you’ll be able to publish a much better listing. Some food trucks listed on our website are asking as much as $100,000. If someone is going to make a 5 or 6 figure investment in your vehicle, they’ll need a lot of details before pulling the trigger. Make sure you give them those details!

General Tips When Selling Online

Photos

So what are a few things buyers want to see? They say a picture is worth a thousand words and that is certainly true when listing truck for sale. While your photos don’t need to be professionally done (an iPhone will work just fine for photos) you’ll want to make sure you’ve got exterior and interior photos that clearly demonstrate what the truck looks like. Photos are without question the most important element of selling your truck online. On FoodTruckEmpire.com we recommend a minimum of 4 photos, but more is better.

Detailed Descriptions 

Aside from lack of photos, the second biggest issue we see is lack of information. Again put yourself in the buyers shoes when you create a listing. Would a two sentence description about a food truck you plan to invest $50,000 into be enough for you? Here’s an example of a description we often see:

Food truck for sale. Chevy 1993 P30 with 150,000 miles. Good condition and great opportunity for someone that wants to start a business. Asking $45,000 or best offer. 

How much information does the statement above really provide to a buyer? Not enough information that’s for sure. A buyer will want to insight into the following:

  • What equipment has been installed?
  • What size is the cab? What’s the kitchen layout like?
  • Where did you vend?
  • Why are you selling the vehicle?
  • Any unique aspects of this vehicle?
  • What menu concepts could be executed on this vehicle?
  • What other stuff would you want to know?

Record a Video

Another smart and easy way to add value to your listing is to record a short video walk-through of the truck using your phone or GoPro. Then upload the video to YouTube and include the link. A video walk-through allows prospective buyers to get a true 360 degree view of their truck and step into the inside. This is one of the smartest things you can do as a seller and only takes 15 minutes to record and upload the video to YouTube. Learn how to upload videos to YouTube here. After you’ve uploaded the video to YouTube make sure to include a link to the video for individuals to watch and get a virtual tour of the truck.




Listing Your Vehicle on FoodTruckEmpire.com

Click here to complete our form and submit your vehicle on FoodTruckEmpire.com. It may require 15 – 20 minutes of your time to put a really helpful listing together. That’s totally fine and well worth the effort! This will help your vehicle get listed faster and receive more views on our website, which will ultimately help you sell the vehicle faster and easier.

After you submit your listing on our website, it will typically take 48 hours to respond to your listing by email. If your listing looks good, we will send you a link to your listing so you can check it out. If you are missing information, we will send you an email to let you know we need more images or a longer description before publishing.

Examples of Quality Listings on Our Website:

Here are a few listings that we thought were really well done and provided a lot of information for the visitors of our website. Feel free to use these as a guide:

https://foodtruckempire.com/listings/peanut-butter-jelly-philly/ – Lots of great photos and a detailed description.
https://foodtruckempire.com/listings/smokey-paws-food-truck/
https://foodtruckempire.com/listings/13-box-truck-retail/ – Note the YouTube video added to this listing. Nice touch!

Key Fields to Complete

There are 27 total fields that need to be completed to submit your listing through our website. Most of the information is extremely straight-forward such as mileage or year of a vehicle. The fields listed below are the ones we find most people get hung up on and wanted to provide some extra help when completing.

Additional Description Field

The additional description field is your opportunity to explain all the details of the vehicle for sale. Refer to the detailed descriptions section of the post (located above). As a rule of thumb we recommend writing between 200 – 300 words minimum when submitting this description. More is even better if it makes sense.

Uploading Images

Having high-quality interior and exterior photos is critical to publishing a good listing. One of the limitations of our listing system currently is the max file size is 2 MB per photo. If you’r files are over 2MB in file size, we won’t receive the photos on our end. To ensure your files are small visit the website ImageOptimizer.net. This tool is very simple to use and will ensure that the photos you submit will fit with our system. As a rule of thumb we recommend uploading at least 4 photos of your vehicle, but more is better.

After you submit your listing it will take us about 48 hours to review. If you have any further questions about the listing process don’t hesitate to reach us by email for additional support.

Want to start your own food business?

Hey! I’m Brett Lindenberg, the founder of Food Truck Empire.

We interview successful founders and share the stories behind their food trucks, restaurants, food and beverage brands. By sharing these stories, I want to help others get started.

If you liked this story, sign up for our newsletter that includes our food business startup kit and most popular interviews sent straight to your inbox.

Know someone interesting that should be interviewed on the website? Tell us about them here.