Thinking of building a Trade Me alternative. Tell me why it's a terrible idea

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yudumcan

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#324537 23-Apr-2026 14:51

Going to be upfront, I'm not just asking to be nosy. I've been in the software industry for over 10 years and seriously considering building something to compete with TradeMe. But before I commit, I want honest feedback from real NZ buyers and sellers, because the last thing I want to do is spend my time building something nobody actually wants.

So tell me why this is a bad idea. Or why it isn't.

A bit of context on what I'm thinking. Free to list for everyone, always. No success fees. No dropshipping. Verified NZ accounts only so you know you're dealing with actual Kiwis. Modern design that doesn't feel like it was built in 2003. AI tools built in so you can take a few photos on your phone and have your listing written for you including title, description and suggested price. And for buyers, optional protection with a small fee that actually covers full refund and return shipping if something goes wrong, or free bank transfer if you'd rather take your chances.

A few specific things I genuinely don't know the answer to:

If you sell regularly or run a small online store:

Would a store dashboard with AI tools that:

write your listings from photos
suggest the right title, description and category automatically
show you what similar items actually sold for
flag demand trends so you know what's hot right now
track your views, saves and conversion rate per listing
manage your orders, messages and shipping in one place
show your store analytics, revenue, top sellers, what's not moving
display your buyer feedback and response rate
give your store a public profile page with your ratings and policies

..be worth paying a small monthly subscription for? Or is that solving a problem you don't actually have?

2. If you're an occasional seller:

is zero fees enough to make you try somewhere new even if it has fewer buyers to start with? Or is it purely about audience size and nothing else matters?

3. If you're a buyer:

do you care about buyer protection? Would you pay around $1-2 on a $50 item for a genuine money-back guarantee including return shipping covered? Or would you always choose free bank transfer and take the risk?

And the big one

what would it actually take for you to switch regardless of whether you're a buyer or seller? And if you're a business, would you consider listing on our platform and Trade Me at the same time while waiting to see if it gets traction, or is that too much hassle?

Be brutal. I'd rather know now than after I've built it. Thank you all :)

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#3483512 23-Apr-2026 14:59

"considering building something to compete with TradeMe"

The problem is that Trademe is no long the market leader in the field its FB Marketplace..
That's where all the listings have gone. So you need to think "How can I do a better job than FB" ..

FB charge nothing so you have to compete with that from the get go, .. saying "no success fees" isn't going to make an alternative attractive to FB sellers as that's what they have now...

Building a better mouse trap is always possible,

But you just need to be measuring yourself against the leading competitor.

yudumcan

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#3483527 23-Apr-2026 15:11

That's a fair point. FB Marketplace has absolutely eaten the casual local pickup end of the market, nobody's disputing that and you're right that "no success fees" means nothing to someone already listing on FB for free.

But I'd push back on FB being the leading competitor for what we're thinking about. Free local pickup is one slice of the market. What FB can't do is give a buyer any protection whatsoever, provide a seller with actual tools to manage inventory or track what's selling, filter out scammers, or give a business a proper storefront. The NZ FB Marketplace scam situation is genuinely bad, there have been multiple news articles about it.

The people still on TradeMe paying Ping fees are there because they don't trust FB for anything over about $50. That's the gap we're looking at, not the free couch pickup market, but the $50-$2000 secondhand and small business market where trust actually matters.

But you've made me think about how we explain that differentiation clearly from day one. If our positioning reads as "Trade Me but cheaper" then you're right, we've already lost. It needs to read as FB Marketplace but with actual trust and protection. cheers

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#3483529 23-Apr-2026 15:13

Bad idea

Wheedle shuts site after technology fails | Stuff

yudumcan

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#3483533 23-Apr-2026 15:26

Wheedle is a great example, worth understanding why it failed though, because it wasn't "Trade Me crushed them." Wheedle shut down on day two because a someone tweeted instructions on how to change reserve prices on other people's auctions. Critical security hole, live on launch day. That's a technical failure not a market failure.

Wheedle had 17 programmers and burned through $18 million before closing. The owner got sick and lost control of management. These aren't reasons the NZ market can't support competition. They're reasons why they collapsed.

The lesson from Wheedle isn't "don't compete with Trade Me." It's "don't raise $18 million, hire 17 people and launch with a security hole." We're two people, planning to start lean and if it doesn't work we walk away. No $18 million at stake.

The other thing; Wheedle launched in 2012. There was no Ping fee, no private equity, no FB Marketplace trust crisis. The reasons people are frustrated with Trade Me right now didn't exist then. But thanks for the feedback

ringbearer

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#3483548 23-Apr-2026 15:40

Trust is the biggest issue I think. Even Trade Me is unreliable for popular items like iPhones and cameras. I've had a fair number of emails from Trade Me's safety team telling me not to engage with an auction.

If you can solve that, I think you're in with a real shot.

Other issues that annoy me about both platforms:

Search and filtering is terrible on Facebook.

Location search is terrible on Trade Me.

Trade Me filters and categories are very out of date, and seem to be updated on an ad-hoc basis. Why I can't I search for a MacBook with a specific generation of processor?

Good luck!

richms

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#3483551 23-Apr-2026 15:43

Trademe is just one of many marketplace platforms that people peddling new stuff can put them on now - kogan have their 3 - kogan, dicksmith and mightyape, there is the warehouse, and I expect we will see bunnings do what they have done in AU here sometime soon too.

You will be just another place to sync product info to and get sales from. Nothing special there.

The used stuff on trademe has been decimated by facebook marketplace. If we ever had craigslist take off here then they wouldn't have got off the ground.

Both aspects of trademe are already being chomped away at. They will not be here much longer I think. You would just be joining them in a trip to irrelevance IMO.

For selling things you are going to compete with shopify who are getting a bulk of small sellers setting up their own sites now. With their horrid shop product that blurs the line between ecommerce platform and website products.

How would you win people over from those products?

Richard rich.ms

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yudumcan

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#3483554 23-Apr-2026 15:52

ringbearer:

Trust is the biggest issue I think. Even Trade Me is unreliable for popular items like iPhones and cameras. I've had a fair number of emails from Trade Me's safety team telling me not to engage with an auction.

If you can solve that, I think you're in with a real shot.

Other issues that annoy me about both platforms:

Search and filtering is terrible on Facebook.

Location search is terrible on Trade Me.

Trade Me filters and categories are very out of date, and seem to be updated on an ad-hoc basis. Why I can't I search for a MacBook with a specific generation of processor?

Good luck!

This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for, thank you.

Trust is where we're putting most of our energy. NZ verified accounts only is the foundation, you have to verify your identity to sell, which immediately cuts out the overseas scammers and fake accounts that flood both Trade Me and Facebook. On top of that, the buyer protection holds payment in escrow until you confirm the item arrived as described. So if someone lists an iPhone that turns out to be a brick in a box, the money never reaches them. That's the mechanism that builds trust rather than just hoped for.

The search and categories point is something I feel personally. The MacBook processor generation example is perfect. Trade Me's category tree looks like it was designed in 2009 and nobody ever touched it since. We're building search that works the way people actually think about items, not the way a spreadsheet of categories was organised fifteen years ago. AI-assisted categorisation means a seller doesn't have to find the right category, the listing gets filed correctly automatically based on what's in the photos and description.

Location search is also on the list. Finding something within 20km of where you actually live shouldn't require three workarounds.

Really appreciate the examples. They're going straight into the product brief :)

yudumcan

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#3483562 23-Apr-2026 16:05

richms:

Trademe is just one of many marketplace platforms that people peddling new stuff can put them on now - kogan have their 3 - kogan, dicksmith and mightyape, there is the warehouse, and I expect we will see bunnings do what they have done in AU here sometime soon too.

You will be just another place to sync product info to and get sales from. Nothing special there.

The used stuff on trademe has been decimated by facebook marketplace. If we ever had craigslist take off here then they wouldn't have got off the ground.

Both aspects of trademe are already being chomped away at. They will not be here much longer I think. You would just be joining them in a trip to irrelevance IMO.

For selling things you are going to compete with shopify who are getting a bulk of small sellers setting up their own sites now. With their horrid shop product that blurs the line between ecommerce platform and website products.

How would you win people over from those products?

Appreciate the response but I think there's a category mismatch in how you're framing this.

We're not building a new goods marketplace to compete with Kogan, Mighty Ape or The Warehouse. Nobody needs another product catalog destination and you're right that space is crowded. What we're building is a C2C secondhand marketplace with a community at its core, that's a completely different thing. The store subscription we're thinking about is for small NZ operators selling their own stuff, not for retailers syncing ten thousand units.

On Shopify, that's actually complementary not competitive. A small NZ business on Shopify still needs somewhere to get discovered. They'd list on our platform to reach local buyers the same way they might also list on Trade Me. We'd be another sales channel for them, not a replacement for their own store.

The most interesting thing you said is that both aspects of Trade Me are already being eaten away and they won't be here much longer. If that's true and I think you're more right than wrong then the question isn't "why compete with Trade Me" it's "what fills the gap when it's gone?" FB Marketplace won't fill it. You can't buy a $1200 camera off a stranger on FB with any confidence. Something trusted has to exist in that space.

That's the gap. Not new goods, not Shopify territory. The $50-$2000 secondhand market between strangers who need to trust each other. Trade Me used to own that. Nobody owns it well right now.

gzt

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#3483573 23-Apr-2026 17:02

Probably the big security challenge TradeMe has is trusted account takeover. I suspect it is now the main fraud vector. Currently TradeMe does not require 2FA. I'd guess non-2FA accounts are the biggest vector.

But, who knows because, 2FA is not foolproof if the underlying email account is compromised. I'd guess there is a good share of that.

You have identified trust and verification as a key differentiator. Given it is a very large trust failure how do you intend to address that issue?

pdh

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#3483577 23-Apr-2026 17:11

Good Idea ;-)

For me, Facebook Marketplace has backed into its emergent position - because the alternatives are crap.

FBM lacks any sort of trust metric, has poor picture presentation, no shipment/payment capability and a stupid ''radius' distance filter that makes an NZ search impossible. It's CraigsList done even more badly. But you get what you pay for... and I have used it several times.

Wheedle blew their chance with bad prep work - or possibly bad tech - it doesn't really matter.
They blew it when they crashed the web site, shortly after trying to get people to jump ship from TMe.

TradeMe just killed the golden goose. It was well done and covered most bases for 20 years.
But the new, new owners got too greedy and pushed people into actively seeking cheaper (if worse) alternatives.
It's been a bit like seeing one of the foiling catamarans crash off its foils, down to hull speed.
Too early to tell if the love affair will reignite with the new 'no sales fees' policy.

For me, the cleverest thing TradeMe did was come up with a relatively-hard-to-spoof Trust measurement.
Unlike TripAdvisor or Amazon, it's hard to corrupt a vendor's reputation.
A history of buyer satisfaction is powerful tool for a thoughtful buyer.

Unfortunately, at the moment, few people are feeling bullish about running out & buying a sofa or a bike or a TV.
So with demand down, it's a buyers market and used stuff is going cheap.

A community selling tool is a tricky thing - even more than AirBnB or Uber, it relies on a critical mass to make it work - getting to that critical mass quickly would (in the old days) have meant a big media spend. And/or a catchy meme.

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#3483580 23-Apr-2026 17:24

You either have to go deep into a specialist area or wide. If you go wide you need very deep pockets. The only reason to use a new selling site is if they have buyers for what sellers are selling.

That means spending a fortune on advertising and free/inexpensive selling until the site becomes ubiquitous.

It can be done but you need tens of millions of funding. The site will lose money for years until it becomes popular enough to make money

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yudumcan

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#3483581 23-Apr-2026 17:25

gzt: Probably the big security challenge TradeMe has is trusted account takeover. I suspect it is now the main fraud vector. Currently TradeMe does not require 2FA. I'd guess non-2FA is the biggest vector.

However, 2FA is not foolproof if the underlying email account is compromised. I'd guess there is a good share of that.

You have identified trust and verification as a key differentiator. Given it is a very large trust failure how do you intend to address that issue?

A few things we're building in from day one:

Mandatory 2FA for all sellers You cannot list without it. NZ phone number verification (or even drivers licence) as the baseline, with an authenticator app option for anyone who wants it.
Device and location anomaly detection If an account that's been quiet for three months suddenly logs in from a new device or unusual location and immediately tries to list ten iphones, that triggers a re-verification before anything goes live. sudden high-value listings" is a strong signal.

The escrow model also helps more than people realise. Because we're planing to use Stripe and Stripe holds payment until the buyer confirms delivery, even a trusted account can't access funds immediately. We're planning to have a 48-hour window for the account owner to notice something is wrong and raise a dispute before money moves. It doesn't eliminate the problem but it reduces the incentive considerably compared to platforms where money transfers instantly.

But saying that, if someone's email and phone are both compromised, 2FA doesn't save them. That's a hard problem and no marketplace fully solves it. What we can do is make the return on account takeover lower by holding funds in escrow and faster to detect through anomaly alerts.

thank you, this is also going into product's brief ;)

yudumcan

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#3483583 23-Apr-2026 17:33

pdh:

Good Idea ;-)

For me, Facebook Marketplace has backed into its emergent position - because the alternatives are crap.

FBM lacks any sort of trust metric, has poor picture presentation, no shipment/payment capability and a stupid ''radius' distance filter that makes an NZ search impossible. It's CraigsList done even more badly. But you get what you pay for... and I have used it several times.

Wheedle blew their chance with bad prep work - or possibly bad tech - it doesn't really matter.
They blew it when they crashed the web site, shortly after trying to get people to jump ship from TMe.

TradeMe just killed the golden goose. It was well done and covered most bases for 20 years.
But the new, new owners got too greedy and pushed people into actively seeking cheaper (if worse) alternatives.
It's been a bit like seeing one of the foiling catamarans crash off its foils, down to hull speed.
Too early to tell if the love affair will reignite with the new 'no sales fees' policy.

For me, the cleverest thing TradeMe did was come up with a relatively-hard-to-spoof Trust measurement.
Unlike TripAdvisor or Amazon, it's hard to corrupt a vendor's reputation.
A history of buyer satisfaction is powerful tool for a thoughtful buyer.

Unfortunately, at the moment, few people are feeling bullish about running out & buying a sofa or a bike or a TV.
So with demand down, it's a buyers market and used stuff is going cheap.

A community selling tool is a tricky thing - even more than AirBnB or Uber, it relies on a critical mass to make it work - getting to that critical mass quickly would (in the old days) have meant a big media spend. And/or a catchy meme.

Thank you for the detailed reply.

On the economic side you're right that confidence is fragile right now, but I'd actually argue that cuts both ways for a secondhand marketplace. When people feel financially squeezed they sell more stuff they don't need and buy secondhand instead of new. Might be reasonable timing rather than bad timing.

Trade Me's reputation system is genuinely hard to corrupt. We start with zero of that history for every user, which is the honest vulnerability in our model. Our answer is partly the NZ verification layer (you know you're dealing with a real local person, not an offshore farm) and partly the escrow model reducing the need to trust the individual as much, if something goes wrong the money comes back regardless. But I won't pretend, It's a gap we have to earn our way out of over time if this thing works.

We're not trying to fight Trade Me's audience. We're using their own open API to cross-post listings simultaneously. A seller lists on us, it also appears on Trade Me automatically. They lose nothing by trying us. Buyers on Trade Me find the listing as normal and can transact there, but the seller is building a presence on our platform at the same time. It's a parasite strategy :) it lets us grow without needing the media spend

dpf81nz

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#3483597 23-Apr-2026 20:11

I've seen a few competitors come and go over the years, they never really got any foothold

TBH the biggest issue with Trademe was the high fees, but they are a lot more reasonable now since they reduced them and I'm more likely to start using it again. Plus theres various buyer protection, its really easy to just list stuff, get paid via Ping and book a courier to pick it up from your house etc all through the app

The main thing that would stop me using a new competitor would be the small % of traffic that trademe gets so it'd be a lot harder to sell my item

I only ever use FB Marketplace for local pickup/pay via cash situations, for anything other than that its a scammers paradise

jonherries

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#3483599 23-Apr-2026 20:18

You should read up on first mover advantage. In general, TM has a monopoly, and as such commands market share, brand recognition and loyalty as well as presumably monopoly rents. With this they will be able to predatorily price out competitors and I would guess the Comcom is unlikely to have the resources to address it due to complexity and focus on other markets.

You might be able to do a good job in some niches - maybe electronics with something that helps buyers and sellers match models/features better but you would need very deep pockets to win market share with the network effect they have in the wider marketplace.

Jon

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