Michael Carney picks up that Trade and Exchange has finally given up on publishing in print. They ceased to be relevant a number of years ago, and will not be missed today. However Trade and Exchange were the Trade Me of their day. They seized an opportunity to grab and extend the classifieds market away …
Category Archives: auctions
Well done Trade Me, but the threat remains
There’s an interesting article over at eBay strategies, which talks about how eBay lost the market for classifieds and mentions that Amazon is taking out the top end. (If you work at Trade Me then you should have eBay Strategies in your RSS reader) I’ve mentioned it here before, and it bears repeating: Trade Me …
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eBay UK stacks it high and watches it fly
eBay have taken a leaf out of 1-day‘s playbook and have launched a Daily Deal on their UK website. The idea is simple – offer a compelling deal from the homepage, drive traffic to the site each day and sell the bargains by the thousands. Meanwhile once you arrive at eBay.co.uk each day, why not …
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The reasons Ferrit failed
Ferrit’s failure has been tipped enough times in these pages – so to make it easy here are the main posts over the past 2 years. I believe that Ferrit failed for three main reasons: Very poor usability, with the site proving far too difficult to use, especially at launch. This turned away customers, and …
The top one thing to change at eBay
A while back I posted a list of the top 10 things eBay could do to improve: Top 10 things to change at eBay I now believe I missed the most important one: 0: Introduce auto-extend on auctions. Auto-extend makes the auction last for, say, 30 seconds longer each time a new bid is received. Trade Me …
eBay’s horror year
It’s not farewell yet, but eBay’s descent in 2008 has been staggeringly complete. I was intending to write about it, but Dinah Balk has done that already. Here it is – 2008 – the year eBay lost its mojo. I’d also call it “How not to run an auction site” or “Compulsory reading if work …
Trade Me has added at least $3 billion to the NZ economy
A persistent, err, troll over at Bernard Hickey’s blog post on Trade Me and Australia asks an interesting question: “How is Trade Me a productive NZ asset? The answer requires just a little bit of economics, and it is really quite amazing. First – Trade Me sold for $750m, and the money was paid to …
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Trade Me trounces eBay, and eBay is in real trouble
The evidence mounts against eBay, as they continue to cast away their franchise. It’s really sad to see this happen as they naturally own their space and should be unassailable if they were playing it right. They are not. Over the years the site has increased in complexity and decreased in humanity, until the community …
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eBay’s descent into oblivion continues
I tried logging into my ebay account last night from Nigel’s computer, and this is what I got after successfully entering my password: I have no idea what my phone number from 1999 (or was it earlier?) is, and I certainly have no way of answering a call to that number. So I started entering …
Top 10 things to change at eBay
I’d love to get into the numbers in the recent changes to eBay, but it is too hard on this iPhone. But regardless, here are my top 10 suggestions for change at eBay: 1: allow google checkout and integrate it. It will provide a clean payment system (unlike paypal) and will force paypal to get …
eBay is selling lovers
Googling for “lover” I noticed that eBay had taken out an adwords ad: Clicking through (gee – had they started an online dating service?), I found an interesting array of… nothing in particular. So – freshen up those ad-words eBay. You may ask why I was searching for “Lover” – I was trying to get …
Trade Me lite is here – for your phone
Go to m.trademe.co.nz – even from your mac (or PC if you really must) browser. It’s simple, stark even and light. A staggering 6.9k home page, versus 292kb for the www home page. Forget about browsing any way but by search. Actually it is a really unfriendly place to just browse for stuff – but …
Ticketmaster has auctions. sort of.
Here is one for Westlife. A lost opportunity for Trade Me perhaps, but ticketing is a tough market to get into as it is all about tying up the suppliers of the tickets. However, given that, Trade Me (or whomever) still has the ability to enter the market by offering the same service at a …
Fairfax & Trade Me results
Not bad – strong profit growth of 40% versus last year, with Trade Me and Digital leading the way. Trade Me showed $32m in EBIT, which is for the 6 month period to December 2007. That, apparently, puts them at tracking to hit the $60m required to complete the $50m earn out to March 2008. …
eBay makes fundamental changes – enough?
Massive changes today announced for eBay’s economic model, in response, I take, to the increasing power of Amazon and Google. Listing fees down 25 to 50%, especially for bigger sellers Gallery is free final value fees (commissions) are up – 8.25% under $25, which is up from 5.25% and huge. Most sales are in this …
Lance Wiggs 