Why are some filters not supported by external sites like Autotrader or Facebook?
Since we're just linking to these sites, we don't have direct control over the search filters they offer. Instead we do our best to map your AutoTempest search parameters to compatible filters on these sites. We do this in several ways depending on the filters themselves:
- We may remove specific unsupported values within a filter while allowing the rest of the supported values to be used on the external site.
- We may pass these unsupported values to the external site's keywords search function.
- We may pass the closest possible value, in the case these sites do not have an exact match for our filters
Facebook Marketplace Searches
Facebook Marketplace limits the combinations of filters that can be used. In particular, when searching with keywords, filters other than price can't be used (such as make, model, transmission, body style, etc.). We try to work around this by converting filters such as make, model, transmission, color, etc. to keywords when you've entered other keywords to search. This may not always produce great results though. Further, there is a limit to the number of keywords you can pass to Facebook, so if there are no Facebook results or your Facebook results are poor, you could try sticking to the predefined filters, and not using the keywords or trim fields.
Facebook on Mobile Devices
For some reason, Facebook Marketplace supports far fewer filters on mobile devices than it does for desktop browsers. On mobile you are essentially limited to searching by keywords only. So, for mobile devices we convert as many of your search parameters as possible to keywords. This might not produce ideal results, so we recommend either using a desktop browser or setting your phone browser to desktop mode to get the best results from Facebook Marketplace.