TradeMe oh TradeMe search

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gzt

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#303818 11-Mar-2023 11:52

My $50 two battery 10 year old Warehouse drill died. Rest in peace you will be missed. There's nothing equivalently cheap in the major shops. Deep breath check TradeMe.

Sorting cordless drills by price is not possible. Lowest price sort, buy now, new, in that category leaves me trawling through $3 drill bits and extensions. Once again reminds me why TradeMe is my marketplace of last resort. TradeMe oh TradeMe..

TradeMe is not a classic monopoly. Barrier to entry is not high. Yet many have tried miserably and failed miserably. Is TradeMe a monopoly?

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#3048899 11-Mar-2023 11:59

Nope. Facebook has eaten their lunch pretty fantastically. A lot of stuff on Trademe is drop shipped junk and stuff from in trade vendors, these days.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

gzt

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#3048901 11-Mar-2023 12:07

toejam316: Nope. Facebook has eaten their lunch pretty fantastically.

Ah. Well I'm unlikely to go anywhere near that.

xpd

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#3048907 11-Mar-2023 12:42

TradeMe unfortunately is a complete mess when it comes to listings. They allow people to list anywhere, and manipulate listing pricing so their products come up regardless how close to what you're after the search is.

Search for a car $2-5k. Get cars $20k+. Its because they allow the sellers to put down the price they want, and a price range - they fake the price range so it appears in the lower price bracket, but the asking price is a lot higher.

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#3048908 11-Mar-2023 12:44

And FB is FULL of scammers..... trying to sell an item there now, and its amazing how many scammers hit me up for it. Dragged one along this morning for a ride. Played along right until they sent me the link for the money.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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Beccara

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#3048915 11-Mar-2023 13:22

Oh dont get me started on the listed "in Auckland" but the ad states international shipping, no way to filter them out. If I wanted to wait a month for an item i'd goto ebay or aliexpress

Most problems are the result of previous solutions...

All comment's I make are my own personal opinion and do not in any way, shape or form reflect the views of current or former employers unless specifically stated

gzt

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#3048917 11-Mar-2023 13:33

xpd:
TradeMe unfortunately is a complete mess when it comes to listings. They allow people to list anywhere, and manipulate listing pricing so their products come up regardless how close to what you're after the search is.

Indeed. It's bad for users and very silly. TM should charge some kind of placement advertising fee and make that part of the system for sellers that can afford it instead of this random mess for users.

Behodar

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#3048920 11-Mar-2023 13:39

gzt:
Indeed. It's bad for users and very silly. TM should charge some kind of placement advertising fee and make that part of the system for sellers that can afford it instead of this random mess for users.

As long as they actually police it. I moderate on another forum and you wouldn't believe the number of people who post ads as regular forum topics instead of going through the (paid) advertising system. I don't know why they even bother; the vast majority get caught by filters and never even appear on the site, and the few that slip through the tracks are typically deleted within minutes.

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RunningMan

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#3048925 11-Mar-2023 14:21

The whole TM searching is woefull compared to the old site. Go back 3 or 4 years (about the time the current CEO started?) and the site used to work pretty well. Searching worked as expected, filters could be applied, but with the new site variant it's just broken. Search returns things that aren't in the words you searched for, and silently restricts the search to some random category that it thinks you want to search for, even if that excludes 90% of the relevant results.

Even the responsiveness of the site is terribly slow. Page load times are incredibly slow when searching compared to other marketplace type sites.

The biggest issue is they don't seem interested in resolving these problems - essentially they seem quite disinterested in any feedback of the site shortfalls.

deadlyllama

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#3048926 11-Mar-2023 14:23

gzt: My $50 two battery 10 year old Warehouse drill died. Rest in peace you will be missed. There's nothing equivalently cheap in the major shops. Deep breath check TradeMe.

Sorting cordless drills by price is not possible. Lowest price sort, buy now, new, in that category leaves me trawling through $3 drill bits and extensions. Once again reminds me why TradeMe is my marketplace of last resort. TradeMe oh TradeMe..

TradeMe is not a classic monopoly. Barrier to entry is not high. Yet many have tried miserably and failed miserably. Is TradeMe a monopoly?

Searching with Condition: used helps a lot. But I'll always search FB Marketplace first. Cash on pickup only though!

TradeMe is in "squeeze more money out of it" mode. Ever increasing success & listing fees, search gets harder and harder to find things. The barrier to entry is marketing and mindshare. You need enough buyers for people to want to sell, and you need enough sellers for people to bother buying. FB did well to slurp up the buy/sell/swap groups that had sprouted organically, into Marketplace.

If you wanted to take on TM you'd probably start in a niche market, then grow from there.

I thought Trademe dropped its expired auctions search a year or two back, and only recently discovered that it's still there, the UI just hid it too well. If they do usability testing it's not for that feature!

RunningMan

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#3048928 11-Mar-2023 14:32

deadlyllama:[snip] If they do usability testing it's not for that feature!

That's the real key - the user experiance is dreadful - the same feature works differently, and will be located in a different place on the page depending on what page you are on. The reason you can't find the expired auction search is because it simply isn't there except on a search results page, so you have to do a dummy search, then apply a filter, then do your actiual search.

richms

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#3048933 11-Mar-2023 15:25

toejam316:

Nope. Facebook has eaten their lunch pretty fantastically. A lot of stuff on Trademe is drop shipped junk and stuff from in trade vendors, these days.

Also impossible to avoid since trademe designed it so that the location is on the seller not the item, and they are quite happy to have sellers with a location in Manukau that is suspiciously like all the other ones, yet not allow pickups and 99% of their listings ship from "their overseas warehouse"

For the OP, I saw bunnings had the ryobi HP drill and driver kit with 2 4Ah batteries on clearance at some branches for $250

Richard rich.ms

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#3048935 11-Mar-2023 15:37

Trademe's site in general is absolute crap now. Nothing wrong with the old site (and search) - the makeover a few years ago felt to me like change just for the sake of change; either that or it was to keep someone in a job there. And I find the "new, improved" site so slow to load.

There have been a fair few contenders (most recent one I can think of is Wheedle) but none have come even close to capturing much of TradeMe's market share at all. Anyone remember Zillions? Sella?

https://teara.govt.nz/en/second-hand-trade/page-3

floydbloke

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#3048936 11-Mar-2023 15:43

Right here is my first go-to for tech (and beyond) buy/sell online classifieds.

Somewhat limited audience and goods maybe, but you're pretty much guaranteed to be dealing with honest grown-ups.

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k1w1k1d

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#3048992 11-Mar-2023 17:03

I also find TradeMe's search rather difficult, but that is often caused by the seller listing in the wrong category. A good example of this is the number of internet routers listed in the power tool category.

The overseas shipping is also a pain, there should be a "stock in NZ" option. As previously mentioned, why wouldn't you just go to Ebay or Amazon yourself?

loceff13

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#3048993 11-Mar-2023 17:10

floydbloke:

Right here is my first go-to for tech (and beyond) buy/sell online classifieds.

Somewhat limited audience and goods maybe, but you're pretty much guaranteed to be dealing with honest grown-ups.

I think the must set a price rule sucks and I avoid selling alot of stuff here comapred to at GPForums buy/sell etc where they allow pricecheck/offers in threads.

Like how do I price a 256GB M4 Crucial SSD when they don't even get sold secondhand these days?

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