"FaceTrade" - My Trademe competitor

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gzt

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#823840 22-May-2013 22:12

bnolan: I sort of think that if you provide a valuable service you should be able to charge for it,

Completely agree with that, and the comments about challenges in introducing charges at a later date.

gnfb

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#823842 22-May-2013 22:21

Sorry I only skimmed through the comments etc . My 2 cents worth
I liked to think I have something to contibute to this conversation with a feedback on trademe of over 13000 and have been using them for well i guess ever anyway
I applaud your efforts an hope you have a USP or will find one I also hope your pockets are deep Unless you are looking at servicing a market that trademe does not. So many have tried to take on Trademe , which i personally think is the wrong approach unless as i say you have deep pockets. As deep as the backers of wheedle or what ever its called.

One of these days ebay may decide to take on the australasia market although I doubt it but if they do it will be "heres 50mil sort it out please"

So if you do something look for a niche that trademe isnt doing

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Klipspringer

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#823938 23-May-2013 08:37

The biggest threat to trademe in NZ in my opinion is ebay (US/UK).

I have found buyers on ebay have quiet reasonable shipping prices. In fact sometimes cheaper all the way from the UK to NZ from say someone in Christchurch/Auckland shipping to Wellington. Shipping time is not that bad either. 5-10days in most case. But it depends who you buying from. I am slowely building up a good reputation on ebay, have not sold anything yet though.

The amount of content on ebay is huge and it just seems to be getting better.

mcraenz

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#823939 23-May-2013 08:40

First up I think it's a great idea. You have a point of difference. Something I can't inderstand with Wheedle they don't seem to have any point of difference. Except no fees for a VERY short period, considering the lunch they are trying to eat.

freitasm: Do not scrap fees. People block ads. You are offering them a service, make sure your product is something they need and will want to pay for.

If you lunch something free now it will be harder later to charge anything.

I don't agree. IF you can build a large community then you will be able to make money. Start tentatively thinking about how in the future you might be able to monetize the site. IMO if you focus on making money from day one or even day 365 you'll likely not succeed substantially in this game. And your first aim money wise should just to break even.
Also consider never making a cent but eventually being acquired by another big player.

Yes some people use ad-blocks but fact is there a plenty of peeple out there who make good money from ads. ADs work that's why they are there.

When you write your code, start considering "how will I make this run in a distributed environment?" Not sure where you're hosting now but consider Amazon EC2, if you write your app in the right way you can then just scale it up as you need to on Amazon.

Also you might want to move fast. Questionable whether it's a good idea to share your idea out in the public like this. How fast can TradeMe or Wheedle create this functionality?

Also, consider global market with a .com.

Once you've launched. Contact the media they'd love to do a story on a something created by a loan kiwi 'overnight' that's better than Wheedle.

Good luck!

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#823948 23-May-2013 08:58

mcraenz:
IF you can build a large community then you will be able to make money. Start tentatively thinking about how in the future you might be able to monetize the site. IMO if you focus on making money from day one or even day 365 you'll likely not succeed substantially in this game. And your first aim money wise should just to break even.
Also consider never making a cent but eventually being acquired by another big player.

So you saying launching a site with no business plan?

universenz

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#823969 23-May-2013 09:29

I'm certain this service already exists in the states, there's just no localised version for NZ. May have gone through a name change recently as I can't find it anymore.

Despite the name, the concept is good, I actually had an idea like this a year or so ago.

The issue I came up against at the time is that in order for me to create a 'market place' page of stuff I was selling I needed to create an app, and then I had to create a Facebook Page for the "App" to be installed as a tab on.

I just stopped working on the project when I knew it would be too hard for the average consumer to start using the tool.

If I understand your proposal correctly, the items aren't kept on the user's profile or a FB page dedicated to the user, they are listed on a centralised database which you host and the user links through to?

So if a friend of mine sees an item I have listed for sale, where does it take them? An app on Facebook, or an external website?

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mcraenz

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#823986 23-May-2013 10:09

Klipspringer:
mcraenz:
IF you can build a large community then you will be able to make money. Start tentatively thinking about how in the future you might be able to monetize the site. IMO if you focus on making money from day one or even day 365 you'll likely not succeed substantially in this game. And your first aim money wise should just to break even.
Also consider never making a cent but eventually being acquired by another big player.

So you saying launching a site with no business plan?

Did I say that?

The business plan should probably focus on how to build a large community and how to cover costs over a significant period of time (e.g. investment or working a day job(s)). There are numerous options for monetizing a site once you have a strong following. Seeing what the community ends up looking like will help you decide what is the best route to take to monetize.

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bnolan

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#824028 23-May-2013 11:21

universenz: I'm certain this service already exists in the states, there's just no localised version for NZ. May have gone through a name change recently as I can't find it anymore.

Despite the name, the concept is good, I actually had an idea like this a year or so ago.

The issue I came up against at the time is that in order for me to create a 'market place' page of stuff I was selling I needed to create an app, and then I had to create a Facebook Page for the "App" to be installed as a tab on.

I just stopped working on the project when I knew it would be too hard for the average consumer to start using the tool.

If I understand your proposal correctly, the items aren't kept on the user's profile or a FB page dedicated to the user, they are listed on a centralised database which you host and the user links through to?

So if a friend of mine sees an item I have listed for sale, where does it take them? An app on Facebook, or an external website?

Hey Universenz, I've seen a few different attempts at selling on facebook, there is 'marketplace' which works quite similarly to what I'm envisaging, except it's US-only. And there's soldsie, which is more for selling on facebook pages - maybe it's similair to what you had in mind.

You definitely wouldn't want people to have to install an app or anything to sell on FaceTrade, you should just authenticate with facebook (a two click affair) and then let them sell things.

When someone clicks on an item you post for sale, I think it would be better to have the app as a standalone site at www.facetrade.co.nz, because then you can customise the display so that the app works well on smartphones (you can't do that if you make it a facebook app at apps.facebook.com).

So your item would be:

www.facetrade.co.nz/items/1234

And your profile might be

www.facetrade.co.nz/users/user-id

universenz

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#824098 23-May-2013 13:07

So essentially you're building an external site (that is like TradeMe) that uses Facebook authentication to skip the signing up process and allows you to list items, which are then 'posted' to your Facebook wall back on Facebook?

Outsiders can check out the external site and if they want to buy an item, they just need to authenticate using Facebook as well and then click "buy"?

I was under the initial impression that you were going to build a Facebook app which people install so that they can list, manage and track their sales and purchases from within Facebook.

bozoonpatrol

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#826704 27-May-2013 22:36

Definitely a cleaner design. I think the Trademe brand is the big factor here, as much as people like to rave on about the prices though, just something to think about.

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