Is $199 for a TradeMe Property Listing still good value?

Yes, I believe so. Lets look at why. Compare a standard NZHerald, or local community paper ad. You only have 3 or 4 lines to sell the property. You can’t highlight all the benefits through such a small space. And the newspaper ads have abbreviations like OSP or ROW which take extra effort to decipher, and compare to other listings that may not have that feature listed. Newspaper classifieds are more “imagination” based!

If you want to add a photo to your newspaper classified this is going to increase the price dramatically. If you want a colour image, over black and white, you’ll have to shell out even more coin. Of course you’ll only get one photo. And the worst part is that a newspaper classified ad is that the ad is one hit wonder! You pay for the ad, and then you have to pay again for a subsequent issue.

In comparison, a TradeMe Property ad is a classified ad on steroids! Its interactive.. You can click around the ad, adding to the experience.

- You can read the lengthy description that hopefully spells out all the features in easy to understand words, not abbreviations.

-You get up to 20 photos. You have a map right there at your finger tips. You have Google street view.

- The best part is that you have NZ’S largest audience. and this audience is nationwide. No one will see your classified ad if its in your local paper.

While price rises are never favourable, at $199 a TradeMe Property listing is still good value. If the price rises much past $250 I believe agents and private sellers alike will solely shift their advertising elsewhere online such as the second largest real estate site realestate.co.nz for a much lower fee.

Correction: TradeMe Property Listings are $199, not $99

In reference to the post below “TradeMe Adds Property IDs”. I have to admit at time of post hadn’t checked the current listing fee.  A little silly of me as TradeMe have been increasing prices on almost all classified categories the the last few months. Property for sale Listing Fee was $99 for an extended period of time and I never envisaged that they would increase much more than $99 for a simple classified listing. But of course this is a silly assumption.  See the above post for more analysis.

Santa get it wrong?

Logging onto TradeMe today I noticed a very amusing ad from TradeMe! Did Santa Get it Wrong? Sell your unwanted presents on TradeMe.

Nice one TradeMe. Seems they make money on both ends! Buying the Xmas present, then selling the unwanted Christmas present. A great position to be in!

Property IDs added to listings

Finally TradeMe has added an ID for each property just like the auction number. This measn you can easily enter and find that property faster. Just note down the Property ID when you view it online, or if you see it on a Real Estate sign in your neighbourhood. A simple yet very effective, idea here.

A note on the relationship between Real Estate Agents and TradeMe:
TradeMe really has been successful in the online propert listings game. Agents have essentially been forced into listings their properties on the site due to buyer pressure. And at $99 to NZ’s largest online audience you are a fool not to have it online.

Lets face it, advertising your rental or house online just beats the pants off any other medium.

TradeMe Asks for Money Back from Sellers

An interesting new feature on the TradeMe website is the “Repay your success fee” link which has appeared this week.

This is located on the auction sale page when you have been refunded success fees by trademe.

This is highly amusing and hails back to the days when trademe used to have a honesty box on the website for people to voluntarily pay trademe more success fees when they sold multiple items to the buyer after the auction ended.

Very funny that bohemoth trademe (making over 1 million dollars in profit each week) is asking for people to send them a few dollars. I guess they thought it was worth a try, and wouldn’t lose them any money by putting the link there. I too wondered about this after I had been refunded the success feee but the buyer mysteriously paid 3 weeks after the success fees had been refunded and item relisted.

Whether trademe will get anyone to repay success fees remains to be seen. Lets face it. How may times have sellers not been able to get back their success fees after the 28 day refund period, after a buyer has jerked them round promising to pay “next week, next pay day”.

The fact is, sellers should keep the success fee if refunded anyway. If the buyer has jerked them around for weeks to begin with, fees have been refunded, then the buyer ends up paying for the item anyway – surely means the seller deserves the fee back! The extra admin time far outweighs the couple extra dollars the seller has made back from keeping the success fee.

Nice Try trademe, and funny how it took ten years of operation to work that loophole out. Its fairly obvious the people running trademe do absolutely no trading themselves on the site, otherwise they would have discovered this bug a decade ago!

TradeMe Ditches Smaps for Google Maps

TradeMe has recently discontinued their partnership with ProjectX who developed the Smaps map site for TradeMe. TradeMe are now using Google maps on each TradeMe property listing. Its a classic case of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

A regular user of smaps.co.nz I preferred the clearer look to Smaps over google’s sometimes messy interface. Also, the predictive street names feature (where you type in say R o g and it comes up with all the Rogers streets in the country) was a very good feature that google dosen’t have. Smaps technology and layout is still available thru the ZoomIn.co.nz site run by ProjectX.

It is interesting to see TradeMe give up in a market segment, as they normally dominate each category they enter. I wonder how much advertising revenue TradeMe will forfeit from their side banners ads that were previously on Smaps.

The main reason TradeMe has switched over is the new NZ “street view” feature in google maps which has thus far only be available for locations in the USA. Street view allows the user to actually view a 3d photo image of the house and neighbourhood as if standing on the street. You can get a street view of almost any urban neighbourhood in New Zealand. TradeMe has incorporated the street view feature on every TradeMe Property Listing.

Make sure you check out Google Maps street view and try locate your house. You may even see your car in the driveway.

Just type in your address to the Google Maps search bar.

http://maps.google.co.nz

Its amazing technology, and to be honest a little scary. Have you heard Big Brother has changed his name to Google?

TradeMe Pulls Wife Beater Singlets

The Heralds reports that Last Friday TradeMe received complaints about “wifebeater” singlets being sold by a trader.

WifeBeater Singlets on TradeMe

Wife beater is a commonly used slang term for the plain singlets. This is pretty pathetic really. Amazing what the threat of bad publicity will do. After pulling the auctions last week, funnily enough the trader is still selling them a week later as “wife beaters”.

Mongrel Mob House for sale on TradeMe

One of the more interesting listings on TradeMe Property is a house located next to the Mongrel Mob Headquarters in Clifton, Invercargill. The house was recently falsely targeted in an arson attack. Looking on trademe the images shows the house boarded up with black fire marks all around the house. The owner has listed for $130,000 but says he will take even $50,000 if someone was to front up with the cash.

Online marketplace expands as NZ economy contracts

From InsideRetailing.com.au

According to TradeMe’s Mike O’Donnell listings in some categories are up 20%, such as trampolines and sporting equipment. O’Donnell reckons the site isn’t feeling the pinch of the recession. He says traders are opting to sell their old gear to free up extra cash. The funny thing is a lot of people would have bought their old stuff off trademe, so now TradeMe gets a second cut of the action! What other retailer can say that.

One of the more interesting points is that over 47% of the goods sold are brand new goods. A far cry from the old garage sales days where everything was second hand. Although I would have thought that brand new goods would have made up a higher percentage.

With the site being focussed more on new goods it really changes the dynamics of the site. It becomes more of a e-commerce retail site, than a private-seller second hand goods market. And with TradeMe shying away from the traditional auction model this further pushes the second hand goods market away. To be honest I hardly ever buy anything second hand from the site. Even going back years I might have bought one or two second hand items. Too much risk, and effort to win an auction. Better to get something new, at a TradeMe price.

Full article available here:

http://www.insideretailing.com.au/articles-page.aspx?articleType=ArticleView&articleId=3924

We only hope TradeMe will add a shopping cart to their site, at least for purchases from the same seller. Its annoying to have to link up more than one purchase from one seller. All they need is a simple shopping cart and one shipping fee calculator. Its not like they can’t afford the technology!

TradeMe Using Amazon Web Hosting?

Logged onto TradeMe this morning and in the bottom left corner loading bar I see:

Read http://S3.amazonaws.com

Now this looks to me like something loading off the S3 Amazon server, which is something very interesting.

Further investigation at amazonaws.com/s3 and yes AWS is Amazon Web Services, an Amazon company. So this looks like a mini partnership between NZ’s Internet Giant and USA’s internet giant. I have checked again several times and have seen this server load again. View the pic below.

Why not jump on to TradeMe and see if you can find it!