What Does a Competitor Site Need To Seriously Take on Trademe?

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#1478478 25-Jan-2016 18:12

richms:

Hardly a glowing endorsement of their hosting then.

It is probably shared hosting, which is reasonable for the price, and fine for most business websites. But when you have hundreds of people hitting the site at the same time, they obviously need some sort of dedicated hosting in a datacentre. They could be paying $20 per month, while trademe is likely paying 10's of thousands a month to host, if not more.

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#1478492 25-Jan-2016 18:35

So he is completely wrong and doomed from the start.

Shame.

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jnimmo

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#1478619 25-Jan-2016 21:39

It is a shame, just days after we were talking about the TradeMe thread.

Canadian based servers apparently. Why? Perfectly affordable hosting in Sydney at the very least if not NZ.

My one piece of advice is please disable sign-ups and log ons until you've got SSL enabled.. maybe it is just an elaborate phishing scheme

Kyanar

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#1478662 25-Jan-2016 23:05

Apparrently he's created a "World First" - a responsive design auction site that doesn't require an app, unlike Trade Me and eBay, which both have no responsive... wait a minute...

chewster

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#1478672 25-Jan-2016 23:36

Kyanar:

Apparrently he's created a "World First" - a responsive design auction site that doesn't require an app, unlike Trade Me and eBay, which both have no responsive... wait a minute...

Yeah, probably not the first auction website in the world to have a responsive front-end.

But both Trade Me and eBay (and Geekzone I'll add ) arguably don't have a responsive front-end that dynamically scales depending on the viewport width. They have an adaptive front-end where the server sends out a different page, depending on some combination of user-agent (mobile/desktop/OS/browser/etc) sent in the initial HTTP GET request and/or stored cookie data and/or maybe some other stuff.

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Coil

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#1478710 26-Jan-2016 08:01

chewster:

Kyanar:

Apparrently he's created a "World First" - a responsive design auction site that doesn't require an app, unlike Trade Me and eBay, which both have no responsive... wait a minute...

Yeah, probably not the first auction website in the world to have a responsive front-end.

But both Trade Me and eBay (and Geekzone I'll add ) arguably don't have a responsive front-end that dynamically scales depending on the viewport width. They have an adaptive front-end where the server sends out a different page, depending on some combination of user-agent (mobile/desktop/OS/browser/etc) sent in the initial HTTP GET request and/or stored cookie data and/or maybe some other stuff.

Wait one more minute..

..We have created a fully integrated 'Responsive Design' platform (similar to Microsoft windows 10)

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darylblake

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#1478714 26-Jan-2016 08:13

Yeh I read the article, and I want to put some positive aspect on it by saying good on them for having a try.
It sounds like he locked himself up for a very long period of time and didn't really get any help from anyone who knows UX, or DevOPS for that matter.

They are things that can be fixed. E.g. move hosting to something that cant horizontally scale well like AWS/Azure. Perhaps look at CDN caching the images, and ux tidy up. That was not 100% responsive. If you click on a large picture of something on your phone the whole viewport changes because the image overflows the viewport. And yes security appears to be handled poorly, unencrypted log on. etc.

Also I think the domain name choice is nasty. I mean by all means give the site a name with a good domain like wheedle did. Even though it didn't mean anything.

The problem with anyone trying to take on trademe in my opinion is they start out at square one and there is no market base. Its the perfect catch 22 situation. You need sellers in order to attract buyers. But no one wants to sell or bother selling for that matter if there are no buyers.

I will say this, when I could feel comfortable selling an item worth about $1000 for a $1 reserve then I would use it to sell. But because no site not even wheedle made me feel that way, then I feel that its not going to happen anytime in the near future. And eBay is just a nuisance in NZ unless you are selling a collectors item.

Trademe are getting very greedy now. Taking 7.5% of the sale price + Listing costs.

I mean to serve 2000 page views on a busy auction (from a varnish cache I might add) and send perhaps 20-30 automated emails for watchlisters/bidders/successful sale, probably being fully automated would probably cost less than $0.50c when they are purchasing IaaS at volume. I have NEVER EVER needed to call Trademe to do anything, and have made well over 1000 trades. Including selling property, and vehicles, and I am sure soo many other people fit into the same category.

Plus they also make extra revenue selling advertising and listing job advertisements (for a good whack too I believe).

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#1479097 26-Jan-2016 15:19

$2.45 million (found on imgur):

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DarthKermit

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#1479104 26-Jan-2016 15:26

Oops, there was a slip up!

This listing was withdrawn by the administrator

Damn, I was just going to hit buy now.

gareth41

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#1479177 26-Jan-2016 17:02

RunningMan:

Here's the latest competition

http://www.4tradeit.co.nz/

Still running slow this afternoon, they should at-least host it in NZ and not on shared hosting, even if they start with a good spec VPS from somewhere like sitehost or buy dedicated gear and put it in a datacentre. They should also look at re-writing the urls from the query string parameters so search engines are not seeing index.php?var=content all the time for every page.

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#1479278 26-Jan-2016 18:46

6 seconds to load it now, its an improvement, but still way too slow compared to the < 1 sec of trademe.

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Coil

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#1479534 27-Jan-2016 07:42

https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/42ilbx/new_kiwi_auction_site_4tradeit_takes_on_trade_me/

Good little read there.

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#1479546 27-Jan-2016 08:09

And that folks is why PeterReader says the "Here we go again". People fail spectacularly when doing this.

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rmt38

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#1479565 27-Jan-2016 08:32

To be fair to the guy, I find a lot of articles in the paper to be overhyped and often misunderstood by the journalist in question. At least I don't see those articles about the up and coming locals who wrote a successful app with 10 sales any more. Maybe he did spend 12 years working on it, and he had to throw it away and start again several times - first in vbscript, then in coldfusion, then in php and finally in whatever. Perhaps the idea percolated for some of the 12. Who knows.

He's just one guy, if it doesn't load too quickly after it's first real publicity, it's not that big a drama.

I did a quick browse through the site. No bids on anything I looked at. Though it seemed the most active non-trademe auction site I've seen so far, in terms of current listings.

I don't know though. I kind of feel like I need to see some buyer activity before I list.

Coil

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#1479590 27-Jan-2016 08:51

He has an off the shelf auction site package on shared hosting.
He has used a terrible skin, Someone should try use a HTTP parser.. https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.4tradeit.co.nz%2F
It gives up at the end because of the errors. Not to mention there are errors on the second line.

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