Geekzone is perhaps one of the only forums where my lower 3 digit trade me user id may not be the winner ;-)

Trade Me has been allowing international sellers in bulk for a few years now, as a local seller it's annoying, but, well, what can you do.  I do dislike the "special treatment" that they seem to get, especially in terms of High Volume Listing fees, I understand there are a few NZ sellers who also get special exemptions, but it seems that every overseas seller can just list as much as they want without any problem from day one.  Meanwhile most of we small players just have to keep grinding away trying to keep enough turnover to push the listing allowance up, or eat the 10c/listing fee.

The introduction of GST collection by Trade Me on the overseas sellers will go a little way towards redressing the balance, it will, in theory (sans other deals) work out that the overseas sellers will pay fractionally more per sale than a GST registered domestic seller will, because Trade Me is going to charge them a tax handling percentage in addition to the other fees (0.35% I believe so not a big amount, but it's something).

I do think that the sellers located in NZ but who are drop-shipping some or all of their stock should be stomped out though, or, and this would be my preference, any listng which is shipped from overseas should have a little flag on the image to indicate it's on the slow boat.