Trade Me likes to ask candidates for jobs to perform a task that should be simple and fun for the applicant. For the CFO they are looking for it’s to do the following: Now the idea of calculating how much money Trade Me makes may not fill most with a sense of fun, but I …
Continue reading “This is not a serious post – unless you want to be Trade Me CFO”
Been to this site recently? Not many have. Just 6500 visitors a day visit Autotrader, a lot less than the over 140,000 per day average that visit Trade Me Motors. Autotrader lost because everything was just too hard and too expensive. Their business practices were inherently expensive and unfair to dealers, and the process was …
Continue reading “Your time is nigh Ticketek. React or die.”
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 …
On Tuesday last week I was lucky enough to listen to an interesting range of cool people give 5 minute talks on the topics of their choice. (ok – only one person hit the 5 minute market exactly, and he had a giant clock on his chest) It was Webstock‘s 3rd birthday and exit from …
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 …
Continue reading “Well done Trade Me, but the threat remains”
There’s a fun discussion happening over on the Unconditional Blog – which if you have not found it yet is well worth following. I commend Alister Helm for not only his writing, but also for balancing the real estate industry (and their archaic ways) and the dot com approach to things. However Alistair write a …
Like Rowan, I’ve been unsubscribing from a lot of list emails recently. Let’s see what we can learn from the process. The Good The best email subscriptions are easy to unsubscribe from – requiring a simple click from inside the email, which bounces to a web page with a confirmation message. This is exemplary – …
Continue reading “Make it easy for me to leave you – unsubscribing”
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 …
Continue reading “eBay UK stacks it high and watches it fly”
Twitter, for members of my family and those other 4 people that read blogs and have not yet discovered it, is a microblogging service that has just hit the main stream media. By definition it is therefore passé, but in the meantime we may as well use it well. Examples: How not to twitter. @NZStuff …
Prof Shiller (remember him from “Irrational Exuberance) has partnered with George A Akerlof in a strangely titled new book: Animal Spirits. I’m recommending it even before reading it. It’s basically about why we don’t behave as rational consumers when faced with economic choices. If you don’t want to wait, then there’s an excerpt from the …
Yesterday I went shopping for a laser printer. I went to Pricespy and Trade Me, along with Ascent where I have successfully purchased before. Pricespy sent me to a few stores, including Ascent, but I will pick on Computer Direct who came back as the cheapest. They have a good url, but they are not …
Continue reading “Getting the basics right makes money – Ascent”
Apparently rumours are circulating about Trade Me and eBay – not that I heard about them until just now. Mod has squashed them anyway, but oh what fun. The problem is that eBay traditionally purchases auction sites, then brings over the content to their own site and use their own model. They struggle to see …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Trade Me has added at least $3 billion to the NZ economy”
