Linuxluver:

Rikkitic: The relevance of Trade Me in today's e-commerce world is a subject that has been dealt with before but I feel impelled to revisit it once more.

I live at a rural address and I often need to buy small items. I used to use Trade Me for this but increasingly the traders there insist on using only courier post, with ridiculous charges for delivery to rural addresses. Often the postage is more than the cost of the item.

Yes, we all have friends in town to get around that but my question is why should we have to? I have posted about this on the Trade Me forum in the past and most of the responses were along the lines of it's only a few dollars so what is your problem? I guess my problem is that where I grew up the customer was always king. If this kind of service is what the customer wants, then it should be provided without question. Otherwise you go out of business. 

Today I ran into the same thing again. I needed a couple of small items and looked first on Trade Me. I sent a query to the seller and the response was not only could they not send it by ordinary post at my risk, but I could only pay for it through the bank, despite Pay Now being on the listing.

My response? Why bother? I went to Aliexpress and immediately found better alternatives for less money, not to mention free shipping to any address in New Zealand, rural or otherwise. Is it any wonder that Trade Me is losing customers? 

Couriers make it harder to claim you never received the parcel....and there are people who do this all the time. Sad, but true.