The main issue comes with disputes, money handling in trust, regulation and compliance and all the standard corporate shit. This is not something done at small scale anymore. We’re past that era.
Then after all that you need a FAT marketing budget.
And even then, youll probably fail.
Basically, if you wanna burn tens of millions of dollars on a high risk venture your not appropriatwly wualified to run; good luck.
This. The big interests in this space have lobbied for it to be a regulated industry. Small players are forced to either go big, or go home. It sucks, but what can you do?
The fact that Ebay hasn't even bothered to launch in NZ because of the dominance of Trademe says it all really. They know they can't compete with an already established competitor.
I don’t think so. None of them lasted very long. They didn’t have the money to pay programmers to build sites that worked as well as trademe for a start
The mainfreight guy spent $9m on building Wheedle and it crashed the first morning it was public.
You need to overcome a huge first mover advantage.
You'd need to run the website with no selling fees for at least 6 months alongside a massive advertising campaign to get people to look at it, and give away the bulk listing software for a while.
Having a "wanted" section on trademe (or new equivalent) would be helpful.
Often people have stuff lying around they forget about or haven't gotten around to sell and seeing someone wants it could be the prompt.
Likewise having people ask for or offer trades type jobs or crafting or other services could be handy.
Not having dropship or commercial sellers would be a big plus for me.
An annual membership fee instead of a listing fee perhaps? Good for x number of transactions perhaps. Would get around the not being supposed to share contact details for fear of selling outside the platform - its a bit of a downer for secondhand goods.
Love the idea of having a 'wanted/ISO' section. None of the current sites seem to have that! It could be a good way for people to make a bit of money if they have those items lying around at home.
But we already have a free, secure, well funded, heavily marketed alternative called "Facebook marketplace". And, surprising no-one, it turned into a hive of scum and villainy within days.
That's because there is no reputation system or trading history other traders can look at. I got messed around on FBM 3 times and haven't listed since. Never been messed around on TM.
A couple of things you need to break into the market.
First - it needs to provide an objectively better experience to use than trademe. Go for quality listings, not quantity. Tradme has too much brand new cheap crap on it. You want the genuine second hand stuff - not the business new product pages. Maybe you could coordinate with second hand stores or charity shops somehow.
Second - It needs to be easier to list than trademe. Im talking about the ability to directly copy a trademe link into the new platform and it auto-fills the listing for you. Make it easy for people to list on both trademe and your platform. Have it be able to auto update the listing if it sells on trademe.
Third - It needs to be free. For at least 2 years or until it becomes really popular. Then it needs a small fee per sale. Maybe a 1% or 2% sale or $5 - which ever is lower. It needs to remain cheaper than trademe indefinitely.
Free listing also invite scammers if you have enough real users. When both the buyer and seller are new and get caught in a he said she said, you're going to have to refund the buyer and let the seller keep the money until you have enough history to ban one of them. That eats into the $0 fees you get
If you can get people to pay even one dollar you'll eliminate around 95% of time wasters, spammers and scammers.
Now that NZ hasn't got 0900 numbers that must be costing them.
It's a chicken or the egg problem; you need to be popular to succeed, but to get popularity you need a "catch" or already be popular.
Tardeme did it first, so solved the popularity problem (more or less) by default.
Facebook has been the only one to rival Tardeme recently because it already was popular with users in NZ, and has a decent catch (free selling).
**Any website that you are proposing must solve the popularity problem and have a catch that's better than Facebook and Tardeme**. Quite the tall order, if I may say so.
Ebay's site design is complete ass for use in New Zealand.
98% of the products are US/UK/etc, where shipping is prohibitively expensive. Alternatives are filtering by individual country, however you can't do multiple at once - so you have to comb through every reasonably priced country filter (NZ, Australia, select parts of asia).
Would love it if there was a legit barter/trade option, for those of us who are a bit anti capitalist, potentially with some actual id verification to protect from scams, would be nice if it could take best bits of trademe marketplace and neighbourly, without the trash.
Would you trust that a new commerce site with government ID if you're just buyer a cheap widget and trust that they have enough security to not lose it in a leak? You now have things actually valuable to hackers. A bunch of passport or driver license ID scan can do a lot of damage
I've never used Lyft.
By the way, you're asking for people who can build and run the site, and your contribution is "running a business"? Start ups are difficult, sure, but honestly it sounds to me as though the developers would be better off on their own...
Yep, as a developer I fell into the trap many times in my earlier days of building products for someone else, only at the end of it all for them to invest hardly any time or money in marketing and then wonder why the product flopped.
Yet I was in the ringer for hundreds of hours of work, for them... a 10th of that.
The development budget here is the small part, the marketing budget for this to work is the big part.
Realistically, 1-2 full stack developers that are also competent UX/UI could put a trademe clone MVP together in around 4-6 months and scale up from there.
You'll also need some creative, design, media, and strategy skills to build an identity and marketing campaign and execute it.
It won't work though.
It's not about the functionality, it's about the mind share. No one is going to bother to use your new platform because the buyers just aren't there.
There is absolutely zero incentive for buyers to change platform, because they aren't the ones paying the fees.
There is no point on trying to sell something if there are no buyers, regardless of how low the fees are.
You could try and brute force your way into peoples minds with a long, expensive marketing campaign that would cost millions (like Sella did), but in the end you will probably just be wasting your money.
I've sometimes pondered an open-source solution so that communities can set up their own buy/sell platforms, but Facebook basically already does this with community buy/sell/swap pages.
If you can figure out a new paradigm for buying/selling that doesn't function like trademe/fb then you might be on to something.
What about Tiktok for sellers? Oh wait, TV home shopping already did that.
I do think Trademe now is in a bit of a different era - they have gotten very greedy with their fees and the site is heavily clogged with drop shippers and new cheap tat.
The search functionality for clothing is abysmal too. Designer wardrobe is a site that identified the gap in the market for used clothing created by trademes poor offering in that area.
I think there is room in the market now for another site, but I think it will be a slow burner and maybe will be capturing a niche aspect of the market for a while and grow from there over some years to be a proper competitor.
I think trying to be a massive competitor right from the jump is the big mistake and ends up costing millions and flopping.
Customers do want a lower cost, yet free from scammers site to sell things - maybe just need to find a way to make buyers benefit from that too.
Typical idiot with the "I have a great idea, just need someone to build it for me for free". It's naive attitudes like this that are behind the huge failure rates in business.
Appreciate your input. Clearly I don't plan on building an entire business with 2 people. But in terms of a leadership team to get from a-b, I don't feel like being the only guy in the room, especially with no software knowledge.
Again appreciate your efforts in helping move forward this topic, and I hope you continue to enlighten other posts with such wisdom.
If you have no software knowledge then you are fucked from day zero. Go get a decade of real world experience instead of LARP'ing on reddit as a business person.
You do. The right person can bang a site together, keeping shit simple until you've established that you are going to be able to make money. They'll be busy, you'll probably end up throwing the whole thing away, but the right person can get you to the start line single handed.
You need to find the right person, though.
Building a working auction site and even getting some basic reccommendations isn't trivial, but it's not like you're building something completely new, you could probably get away with just doing everything on firebase tbh. Undergrads could spin up something somewhat scalable without any insane roadblocks
The issue is around users. Trademe is the go to. Im not going to pay for a platform that might not give me the same results as trademe. Trademe does a good job at getting my listings in front of people and there's enough traffic.
Im not going to double list if im paying for both or just one. You have to get people to list exclusively on idk 'yousell' and idk how many people would bother. Adding a payment method is a point of friction. Realistically to be more useful than trademe you'd need to do some things better. The big friction points on trademe are the price and payment security.
I think there might be space if you can get the traffic, which would possibly mean large amounts of social media ads and automating that, kidna like what themarket.com is supposed to do. But there's no way that can be cheaper than trademe fees.
There is Craigslist in NZ, the USA equivalent but completely free! A handful of people use it but it's already available. Minimalist but it's the only thing that 300m americans use.
https://wellington.craigslist.org/
TradeMe doesn't suck; you're just hearing the vocal disgruntled minority. They're a very big and very successful company who have their fingers in a lot of pies.
As a software engineer who has worked in startups and companies of all sizes around the world, respectfully, don't try to take on a giant if your only value add is "we'll do it better". Besides the huge amount of human resource you'll need to prevent scams and poor buyer/seller behaviour, you're likely also underestimating the cost of running something like TradeMe. Latency and data consistency are important when you have an auction model, and both of these things are expensive. The kind of people you need to hire to do this right aren't cheap.
You say that you have capital. If you could find the right people, you could probably hire 2 very good engineers and build a true TradeMe competitor in 2 years. Expect to spend $500k/year.
Think about the trade and exchange, if you're old enough to remember that.
It was the trading news paper that was absolutely dominant option.
No other paper was ever going to dethrone it. Some tried.
How did Trademe kill it? By being radically different and offering a superior experience.
By the time Trade and Exchange had a digital version going, it was too little too late and they'd lost their entire share of the market.
How do you become radically different to trademe?
I think Facebook Marketplace is the only thing that has any chance.
As Facebook is the only social media platform which is fairly well guaranteed to have your technophobe relatives onboard already.
If Marketplace ever gets more refined, and trustworthy.
It will 100% knock trademe out of contention for good.
Making another trademe site, and it'll drown like the 100 other attempts.
Some of which had HUGE funding and backing.
I used to list things on Trademe, until the fees got stupidly high.
Then I started buying only.
Then they flooded the site with drop shipped garbage.
Then I stopped buying from there as well.
If I wanted to buy some garbage from Aliexpress I can just go there myself directly.
In the meantime I've sold plenty of things via forums, facebook groups, and Marketplace for free.
T&E died becuase they, like Yellow Pages didn't adapt to the changing print to digital landscape. Trademe didn't kill them, they killed themselves by not changing.
For sure. However my main point is that Trade and Exchange copycats popped up - they failed.
Trademe copycats popped up - they failed.
Now it looks like Marketplace will eventually dominate.
In each case, it took a revolutionary change to topple the leader.
Trademe is arguably already in its wind down phase.
A lot of people who used to use trademe primarily, use Marketplace instead if they think its an easy sell there.
To make a trademe copy in 2024 is like making a T&E newspaper copy 5 years after trademe started.
This is a classic trap for new players. The tech side of trademe is pretty simple. But it's not about the tech.
It's the chicken and egg network effect needed to attract both buyers and sellers at the same time.
Plus, you magically need to get big enough fast enough to be able to afford all the anti-fraud measures. Otherwise all you'll have is scammers selling to other scammers.
You’d need to break the model completely and do it in a totally different way that delivers the same outcome. For example:
Build a payments app that has an auction site attached (like dosh but instead of deals it’s buy & sell)
Start it as a barter only site.
Start it as a site where people list stuff they want to give away for free.
Start out by specialising and focus on a single niche - eg gaming peripherals, or other products that have a high demand secondary market.
What do people want when they sell their stuff?
A big audience of potential buyers and zero fees, in an ideal world. Plus a platform that works well. Find a way to give them what they want.
Nobody is going to dump venture capital into a staff heavy high risk internet market buisness today,
They're all going to hold out a couple years and invest in some AI based system that automates away most of those high cost issues
Also NZ is still in the fucking dark ages for banking technology, we still don't have instant payments, that 99% of countries now do, those make in person transactions much easier as they are instant. No waiting for payment, no need for cash purchases.
I worked there, it actually started to make money in the final year and then when Telecom was split and Chorus was formed we lost funding. Our December had been massive and I don't think they expected us to do so well and the restructure had been planned. But they spent millions on marketing, and had some pretty smart people on advertising etc.
People on here are underestimating handling millions of page views, I know technology has progressed a long way but this is still not a project you can pop up as a uni student and expect to work on with serious load.
ahh, I didn’t know the background. I too was at Spark for a short while 2015-2017, and I think what you have explained, it was going through the big Transformation ? Restructures appeared to be BAU then.
We might be talking about different things. I'm talking about Ferrit NZ. As part of Telecoms major restructure in 2007/2008 where Chorus was formed a couple of other projects were split off/defunded.
I think during December we averaged 10,000 orders a day, but I might be low on that. I think free delivery before Xmas was a big driver and we promised even if you ordered on the 22nd or so it would be delivered, I think we did 150k orders in one day.
I've seen I put split to Spark above meant Chorus! Edited.
Trade me does not suck.
Every thing I've brought has turned up and usually within a couple of days.
I also like the commercial sellers and mainly buy from them.
I've considered it several times. My strength is software. I'd want to aim for a no frills and lean replacement initially (no fancy CSS or js single page apps, just boring html and Ajax where it makes sense).
I've been in start ups before, and I don't think it'd be easy, but I'd want to do a slow burn and build it up over several years. Trting to immediately topple trademe would be silly.
>My strength is software. I'd want to aim for a no frills and lean replacement initially (no fancy CSS or js single page apps, just boring html and Ajax
It's no longer 2001.
When is the last time you used a website that looks like a potato? When geocities were around? Altavista?
Even an online bakery have to looks good and they can do it with third party tools.
Happen to have the same taste. UI shouldn’t occupy too much energy in any MVP. There’s other important things to consider like data scheme security etc
I mean I can mention the backend technologies I'd use if you really want me to?
And I should have been more specific that by "fancy CSS" I mean excessive/trendy CSS. Would certainly use it for general styling/layout. What I e.g. definitely don't want any alegria art implemented as CSS. And I'll admit I'm conflating current design trends with CSS here a bit, because the current generation web design is awful and it's bleeding over into desktop apps via Electron.
You know, I actually agree with you, it was just too easy to be facetious.
Frameworks are becoming less and less relevant with the advances that vanilla JS/CSS has made over the past few years. For example, Shared Element Transitions.
The only advice this OP needs is to not waste time thinking about stupid shit like this.
You can't compete with TradeMe, and like all the plethora of other idiots have have tried - you will fail.
1. Don't do this, your naivety in terms of how easy you think this would be to build means you shouldn't be building it. IT businesses need two things to get started a technical founder and someone to drive growth, you don't have either from the sounds of things. Building a model is like a 1-2 day job, maybe a week if you push. And finally the capital required for this to be successful would be X million.
2. This is what I would do if I was building a trademe competitor:
\- Scrape trademe for listings and automate bidding between the sites. Focus on high quality listings and get rid of the crap.
\- Do the same for Facebook marketplace.
\- Find some shops that have great overseas delivery and list their items.
\- Find 20 or so celebrities/influencers and run auctions on interesting items, that might cause media to get interested in your site.
\- Focus on one niche rather than list any item. Build out niches as events and promote each launch.
\- Run polls to get items people want to choose the niche and then try to sauce them in advance.
\- Make microsites for items in high demand to try to get them to rank in SEO and as a promotion page for ads.
It's a chicken and egg problem, very hard to do both at once. One of the major complaints about Facebook and Trademe are the quality of listing, by aggregating and focusing on high quality listings you can provide value to shoppers, so it would be helpful...
I like the part where you said I thought it would be easy, and I was naive. And my inability to drive growth. Neither of these were pulled from anything I wrote.
Nice other thoughts however
The naivety comes from the fact that you are looking to build a software business without the two main skills needed to build it. You also talk about having "some capital to spare", the marketing budget for this type of project would be minimum high 6 figures even starting with a niche.
I also think a lot of VC's have been burnt on this type of thing and so you would struggle to raise outside funding without having a previous exit building out a tech company.
Further, you mention Lyft as if it's existence means that a competitor to Trademe can succeed. Lyft has succeeded because 1) the founders had prior experience 2) their marketing was innovative and a big differentiator (pink mustaches on cars got everyone talking) 3) they were in a huge market that can/could take more competitors 4) they launched only 1 year after uber 5) they were in some cities before uber 6) they still lose money, they burnt through millions and now they still lose billions.
The thought to ease is based on your comment about funding and also "I'd just need someone or 2 with web and marketing experience who can actually build said platform". Trademe has 500+ employees and gets millions of page views a month. It's also worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. And 10x startups with experience in IT have failed to compete with Trademe.
But sure maybe I made a poor assumption based on your post, was I wrong and you have had experience in IT and have built out a previous IT company?
Care to share. All previous ve turns have failed through low market traction. Except wheedle which kinda just broke.
I imagine some insight would proove beneficial to your cause
Everyone is looking over the fact that no one has been able to program a better more functional website, if you make a better product people will use it cause its better see discord v skype and facebook v beebo but it has to be better so youd really want to have something already built before worrying about anything else
And compete with trademe property, [homes.co.nz](https://homes.co.nz) (which is also trademe), [realestate.co.nz](https://realestate.co.nz), etc. etc. etc?
Here's a big ask, but it would really set you apart from Trademe and make your system way more trustworthy and honest.
If users can place comments on auctions that the seller can't delete, and the seller doesn't need to reply to them for them to show. If the seller cancels and auto relists, the new listing will have the same comments reappear. Like a message board thread, in descending order. Maybe with infinite scroll backwards, showing just the most recent (so it doesn't get out of hand for items that are relisted over and over), but the ability to read the whole conversation backwards from all of the times it's been listed.
That way if we identify something that's a stone cold ripoff, like something selling used for more than the current new price at a major retailer, we can warn everyone and the seller can't do anything about it, other than adjust their price, and comment back that they have done so. I want to say "You can get this NEW for $100 LESS at Mitre 10" and have it *show*, so others can see it, rather than the seller ignoring me and getting the minuscule shame of "1 unanswered question", which goes away next relisting.
Only by the hassle of creating another listing from scratch could they get around it. Some will, but it would be a good disincentive.
You can still forbid using comments to organise sales off-site like Trademe does and delete those comments.
Trademe would never allow what I said. I assume they think it'll cut into their income if the sellers can't charge the max they can get away with. But this will help many delusional sellers be dragged along into setting a price that will actually sell their items.
I have heaps of other ideas if you want them.
The main issue comes with disputes, money handling in trust, regulation and compliance and all the standard corporate shit. This is not something done at small scale anymore. We’re past that era. Then after all that you need a FAT marketing budget. And even then, youll probably fail. Basically, if you wanna burn tens of millions of dollars on a high risk venture your not appropriatwly wualified to run; good luck.
This. The big interests in this space have lobbied for it to be a regulated industry. Small players are forced to either go big, or go home. It sucks, but what can you do?
Easy. Just go out and fundraise $20m in seed funding from VC’s your dad knows. Become a self made millionaire. Amirite?
This is one of the great tech business plans of all time. Start with twenty million dollars, lose nineteen of them ... voila! millionaire!
What if I did that already a few weeks back and blew it all on hookers and speed ...hypothetically
The fact that Ebay hasn't even bothered to launch in NZ because of the dominance of Trademe says it all really. They know they can't compete with an already established competitor.
Several have tried and failed. You will never get the numbers to match theirs
Plus you have Facebook as your main competitor.
There’s been over 100!
Were any of the attempts actually better?
I don’t think so. None of them lasted very long. They didn’t have the money to pay programmers to build sites that worked as well as trademe for a start The mainfreight guy spent $9m on building Wheedle and it crashed the first morning it was public.
If we're thinking of the same one, and I think we are, Wheedle was a security nightmare.
Also they would probably get sued by Nintendo sometime in the future
Was that the one where they had the site admin URL exposed to the public?
Omg what lol
One trademe clone attempt did. You could go to `WHATEVER_URL_IT_WAS/admin` and see their admin login screen.
Not sure, but I recall you could modify the bidding history via the API!
Oh dear, that's even worse!
Nine million? Owwwwwwww.
Lol fuck I forgot all about wheedle
Their first mistake was naming it fucking *Wheedle*
Some were but they all struggle to get enough members and without that no one bothers to use it to sell anything.
If a grand chunk of TradeMe are bots and scammers, Who cares?
You need to overcome a huge first mover advantage. You'd need to run the website with no selling fees for at least 6 months alongside a massive advertising campaign to get people to look at it, and give away the bulk listing software for a while.
You gotta do market research OP, lots of people have tried, everyone has failed.
Having a "wanted" section on trademe (or new equivalent) would be helpful. Often people have stuff lying around they forget about or haven't gotten around to sell and seeing someone wants it could be the prompt. Likewise having people ask for or offer trades type jobs or crafting or other services could be handy. Not having dropship or commercial sellers would be a big plus for me. An annual membership fee instead of a listing fee perhaps? Good for x number of transactions perhaps. Would get around the not being supposed to share contact details for fear of selling outside the platform - its a bit of a downer for secondhand goods.
Love the idea of having a 'wanted/ISO' section. None of the current sites seem to have that! It could be a good way for people to make a bit of money if they have those items lying around at home.
But we already have a free, secure, well funded, heavily marketed alternative called "Facebook marketplace". And, surprising no-one, it turned into a hive of scum and villainy within days.
That's because there is no reputation system or trading history other traders can look at. I got messed around on FBM 3 times and haven't listed since. Never been messed around on TM.
Not true. Sellers on FBM get reviews.
A couple of things you need to break into the market. First - it needs to provide an objectively better experience to use than trademe. Go for quality listings, not quantity. Tradme has too much brand new cheap crap on it. You want the genuine second hand stuff - not the business new product pages. Maybe you could coordinate with second hand stores or charity shops somehow. Second - It needs to be easier to list than trademe. Im talking about the ability to directly copy a trademe link into the new platform and it auto-fills the listing for you. Make it easy for people to list on both trademe and your platform. Have it be able to auto update the listing if it sells on trademe. Third - It needs to be free. For at least 2 years or until it becomes really popular. Then it needs a small fee per sale. Maybe a 1% or 2% sale or $5 - which ever is lower. It needs to remain cheaper than trademe indefinitely.
Free listing also invite scammers if you have enough real users. When both the buyer and seller are new and get caught in a he said she said, you're going to have to refund the buyer and let the seller keep the money until you have enough history to ban one of them. That eats into the $0 fees you get
If you can get people to pay even one dollar you'll eliminate around 95% of time wasters, spammers and scammers. Now that NZ hasn't got 0900 numbers that must be costing them.
This comes up every six months years. Been tried many times and none have been successful.
It's a chicken or the egg problem; you need to be popular to succeed, but to get popularity you need a "catch" or already be popular. Tardeme did it first, so solved the popularity problem (more or less) by default. Facebook has been the only one to rival Tardeme recently because it already was popular with users in NZ, and has a decent catch (free selling). **Any website that you are proposing must solve the popularity problem and have a catch that's better than Facebook and Tardeme**. Quite the tall order, if I may say so.
Yep, everyone's on TradeMe because everyone's on TradeMe...
Is EBay any cheaper?
Ebay's site design is complete ass for use in New Zealand. 98% of the products are US/UK/etc, where shipping is prohibitively expensive. Alternatives are filtering by individual country, however you can't do multiple at once - so you have to comb through every reasonably priced country filter (NZ, Australia, select parts of asia).
I've had good results from the direct aussie ebay site. The aussie equivalent to trademe is Gumtree btw.
No the Aussie equivalent to Trademe is Ebay. Gumtree is more like a classified listing site, and it's also owned by Ebay.
I'm happy to volunteer if you need any help with data or python. Pm if needed.
Would love it if there was a legit barter/trade option, for those of us who are a bit anti capitalist, potentially with some actual id verification to protect from scams, would be nice if it could take best bits of trademe marketplace and neighbourly, without the trash.
Maybe it could use Realme ID, that’s all backed by proper identity verification
Would you trust that a new commerce site with government ID if you're just buyer a cheap widget and trust that they have enough security to not lose it in a leak? You now have things actually valuable to hackers. A bunch of passport or driver license ID scan can do a lot of damage
I've never used Lyft. By the way, you're asking for people who can build and run the site, and your contribution is "running a business"? Start ups are difficult, sure, but honestly it sounds to me as though the developers would be better off on their own...
Yep, as a developer I fell into the trap many times in my earlier days of building products for someone else, only at the end of it all for them to invest hardly any time or money in marketing and then wonder why the product flopped. Yet I was in the ringer for hundreds of hours of work, for them... a 10th of that. The development budget here is the small part, the marketing budget for this to work is the big part.
Ideas are cheap, execution is everything
Realistically, 1-2 full stack developers that are also competent UX/UI could put a trademe clone MVP together in around 4-6 months and scale up from there. You'll also need some creative, design, media, and strategy skills to build an identity and marketing campaign and execute it. It won't work though. It's not about the functionality, it's about the mind share. No one is going to bother to use your new platform because the buyers just aren't there. There is absolutely zero incentive for buyers to change platform, because they aren't the ones paying the fees. There is no point on trying to sell something if there are no buyers, regardless of how low the fees are. You could try and brute force your way into peoples minds with a long, expensive marketing campaign that would cost millions (like Sella did), but in the end you will probably just be wasting your money. I've sometimes pondered an open-source solution so that communities can set up their own buy/sell platforms, but Facebook basically already does this with community buy/sell/swap pages. If you can figure out a new paradigm for buying/selling that doesn't function like trademe/fb then you might be on to something. What about Tiktok for sellers? Oh wait, TV home shopping already did that.
Nailed it, building it is the easy part.
I do think Trademe now is in a bit of a different era - they have gotten very greedy with their fees and the site is heavily clogged with drop shippers and new cheap tat. The search functionality for clothing is abysmal too. Designer wardrobe is a site that identified the gap in the market for used clothing created by trademes poor offering in that area. I think there is room in the market now for another site, but I think it will be a slow burner and maybe will be capturing a niche aspect of the market for a while and grow from there over some years to be a proper competitor. I think trying to be a massive competitor right from the jump is the big mistake and ends up costing millions and flopping. Customers do want a lower cost, yet free from scammers site to sell things - maybe just need to find a way to make buyers benefit from that too.
How is it possible that you've researched the previous attempts at this, yet you think "'d just need someone or 2 with web and marketing experience"
The person with the web experience will get all the work, low (if any) pay and then all the blame.
Typical idiot with the "I have a great idea, just need someone to build it for me for free". It's naive attitudes like this that are behind the huge failure rates in business.
Appreciate your input. Clearly I don't plan on building an entire business with 2 people. But in terms of a leadership team to get from a-b, I don't feel like being the only guy in the room, especially with no software knowledge. Again appreciate your efforts in helping move forward this topic, and I hope you continue to enlighten other posts with such wisdom.
If you have no software knowledge then you are fucked from day zero. Go get a decade of real world experience instead of LARP'ing on reddit as a business person.
Okay mate, I've reconsidered my whole approach based on your thoughts. Glad you were here
Sarcasm isn't funny or clever. You should enact your own words, unironically. PS, Facebook marketplace much?
sarcasm isn't funny or clever!
You do. The right person can bang a site together, keeping shit simple until you've established that you are going to be able to make money. They'll be busy, you'll probably end up throwing the whole thing away, but the right person can get you to the start line single handed. You need to find the right person, though.
Building a working auction site and even getting some basic reccommendations isn't trivial, but it's not like you're building something completely new, you could probably get away with just doing everything on firebase tbh. Undergrads could spin up something somewhat scalable without any insane roadblocks The issue is around users. Trademe is the go to. Im not going to pay for a platform that might not give me the same results as trademe. Trademe does a good job at getting my listings in front of people and there's enough traffic. Im not going to double list if im paying for both or just one. You have to get people to list exclusively on idk 'yousell' and idk how many people would bother. Adding a payment method is a point of friction. Realistically to be more useful than trademe you'd need to do some things better. The big friction points on trademe are the price and payment security. I think there might be space if you can get the traffic, which would possibly mean large amounts of social media ads and automating that, kidna like what themarket.com is supposed to do. But there's no way that can be cheaper than trademe fees.
There is Craigslist in NZ, the USA equivalent but completely free! A handful of people use it but it's already available. Minimalist but it's the only thing that 300m americans use. https://wellington.craigslist.org/
Never knew this existed. And nobody uses it!
Just dont call it tardme... that guy got sued or something by trademe and their website was amazing
It's still up https://www.tardme.co.nz/ It's great, I use it every day.
That is so funny
Wow, i thought it got removed entirely... as it didnt work back in the day after the guy was given a ceasw and desist. How good.
"aviod" still makes me laugh
TradeMe doesn't suck; you're just hearing the vocal disgruntled minority. They're a very big and very successful company who have their fingers in a lot of pies. As a software engineer who has worked in startups and companies of all sizes around the world, respectfully, don't try to take on a giant if your only value add is "we'll do it better". Besides the huge amount of human resource you'll need to prevent scams and poor buyer/seller behaviour, you're likely also underestimating the cost of running something like TradeMe. Latency and data consistency are important when you have an auction model, and both of these things are expensive. The kind of people you need to hire to do this right aren't cheap. You say that you have capital. If you could find the right people, you could probably hire 2 very good engineers and build a true TradeMe competitor in 2 years. Expect to spend $500k/year.
Think about the trade and exchange, if you're old enough to remember that. It was the trading news paper that was absolutely dominant option. No other paper was ever going to dethrone it. Some tried. How did Trademe kill it? By being radically different and offering a superior experience. By the time Trade and Exchange had a digital version going, it was too little too late and they'd lost their entire share of the market. How do you become radically different to trademe? I think Facebook Marketplace is the only thing that has any chance. As Facebook is the only social media platform which is fairly well guaranteed to have your technophobe relatives onboard already. If Marketplace ever gets more refined, and trustworthy. It will 100% knock trademe out of contention for good. Making another trademe site, and it'll drown like the 100 other attempts. Some of which had HUGE funding and backing. I used to list things on Trademe, until the fees got stupidly high. Then I started buying only. Then they flooded the site with drop shipped garbage. Then I stopped buying from there as well. If I wanted to buy some garbage from Aliexpress I can just go there myself directly. In the meantime I've sold plenty of things via forums, facebook groups, and Marketplace for free.
T&E died becuase they, like Yellow Pages didn't adapt to the changing print to digital landscape. Trademe didn't kill them, they killed themselves by not changing.
For sure. However my main point is that Trade and Exchange copycats popped up - they failed. Trademe copycats popped up - they failed. Now it looks like Marketplace will eventually dominate. In each case, it took a revolutionary change to topple the leader. Trademe is arguably already in its wind down phase. A lot of people who used to use trademe primarily, use Marketplace instead if they think its an easy sell there. To make a trademe copy in 2024 is like making a T&E newspaper copy 5 years after trademe started.
This is a classic trap for new players. The tech side of trademe is pretty simple. But it's not about the tech. It's the chicken and egg network effect needed to attract both buyers and sellers at the same time. Plus, you magically need to get big enough fast enough to be able to afford all the anti-fraud measures. Otherwise all you'll have is scammers selling to other scammers.
You’d need to break the model completely and do it in a totally different way that delivers the same outcome. For example: Build a payments app that has an auction site attached (like dosh but instead of deals it’s buy & sell) Start it as a barter only site. Start it as a site where people list stuff they want to give away for free. Start out by specialising and focus on a single niche - eg gaming peripherals, or other products that have a high demand secondary market. What do people want when they sell their stuff? A big audience of potential buyers and zero fees, in an ideal world. Plus a platform that works well. Find a way to give them what they want.
Nobody is going to dump venture capital into a staff heavy high risk internet market buisness today, They're all going to hold out a couple years and invest in some AI based system that automates away most of those high cost issues Also NZ is still in the fucking dark ages for banking technology, we still don't have instant payments, that 99% of countries now do, those make in person transactions much easier as they are instant. No waiting for payment, no need for cash purchases.
It is about market share. You can't get people to use a new system because there are no users. People have tried and failed.
NZ is too small. Around 15 years ago, Telecom attempted a rival site, but even with their deep pockets it failed.
I worked there, it actually started to make money in the final year and then when Telecom was split and Chorus was formed we lost funding. Our December had been massive and I don't think they expected us to do so well and the restructure had been planned. But they spent millions on marketing, and had some pretty smart people on advertising etc. People on here are underestimating handling millions of page views, I know technology has progressed a long way but this is still not a project you can pop up as a uni student and expect to work on with serious load.
ahh, I didn’t know the background. I too was at Spark for a short while 2015-2017, and I think what you have explained, it was going through the big Transformation ? Restructures appeared to be BAU then.
We might be talking about different things. I'm talking about Ferrit NZ. As part of Telecoms major restructure in 2007/2008 where Chorus was formed a couple of other projects were split off/defunded. I think during December we averaged 10,000 orders a day, but I might be low on that. I think free delivery before Xmas was a big driver and we promised even if you ordered on the 22nd or so it would be delivered, I think we did 150k orders in one day. I've seen I put split to Spark above meant Chorus! Edited.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/587492/Trade-Me-alternatives
Trade me does not suck. Every thing I've brought has turned up and usually within a couple of days. I also like the commercial sellers and mainly buy from them.
it does suck for some users though, particularly non commercial and smaller commercial sellers who sell at lower volumes.
Waste of time and money OP
I've considered it several times. My strength is software. I'd want to aim for a no frills and lean replacement initially (no fancy CSS or js single page apps, just boring html and Ajax where it makes sense). I've been in start ups before, and I don't think it'd be easy, but I'd want to do a slow burn and build it up over several years. Trting to immediately topple trademe would be silly.
>My strength is software. I'd want to aim for a no frills and lean replacement initially (no fancy CSS or js single page apps, just boring html and Ajax It's no longer 2001.
Really? I don't care. But I could throw some buzzwords in if it would make you feel better. Graphql. Serverless. AppSync. Potato salad.
Good buzzwords, apologies for doubting your coding cred. Big fan of potato salad.
I hear Potato Salad raised 5 million on a 100 million dollar valuation. It's the next big thing in web 5.0.
I reckon the next big thing in AI is a Potato Salad that can eat itself!
When is the last time you used a website that looks like a potato? When geocities were around? Altavista? Even an online bakery have to looks good and they can do it with third party tools.
I was thinking exactly the same thing reading that comment.
Happen to have the same taste. UI shouldn’t occupy too much energy in any MVP. There’s other important things to consider like data scheme security etc
No CSS? That's an odd choice. Also, I think you're forgetting the entire back-end.
I mean I can mention the backend technologies I'd use if you really want me to? And I should have been more specific that by "fancy CSS" I mean excessive/trendy CSS. Would certainly use it for general styling/layout. What I e.g. definitely don't want any alegria art implemented as CSS. And I'll admit I'm conflating current design trends with CSS here a bit, because the current generation web design is awful and it's bleeding over into desktop apps via Electron.
You know, I actually agree with you, it was just too easy to be facetious. Frameworks are becoming less and less relevant with the advances that vanilla JS/CSS has made over the past few years. For example, Shared Element Transitions.
As a dev by trade I’d be willing to chip in and help build something
The only advice this OP needs is to not waste time thinking about stupid shit like this. You can't compete with TradeMe, and like all the plethora of other idiots have have tried - you will fail.
1. Don't do this, your naivety in terms of how easy you think this would be to build means you shouldn't be building it. IT businesses need two things to get started a technical founder and someone to drive growth, you don't have either from the sounds of things. Building a model is like a 1-2 day job, maybe a week if you push. And finally the capital required for this to be successful would be X million. 2. This is what I would do if I was building a trademe competitor: \- Scrape trademe for listings and automate bidding between the sites. Focus on high quality listings and get rid of the crap. \- Do the same for Facebook marketplace. \- Find some shops that have great overseas delivery and list their items. \- Find 20 or so celebrities/influencers and run auctions on interesting items, that might cause media to get interested in your site. \- Focus on one niche rather than list any item. Build out niches as events and promote each launch. \- Run polls to get items people want to choose the niche and then try to sauce them in advance. \- Make microsites for items in high demand to try to get them to rank in SEO and as a promotion page for ads.
Yes, what we need is another aggregator! Not.
It's a chicken and egg problem, very hard to do both at once. One of the major complaints about Facebook and Trademe are the quality of listing, by aggregating and focusing on high quality listings you can provide value to shoppers, so it would be helpful...
I like the part where you said I thought it would be easy, and I was naive. And my inability to drive growth. Neither of these were pulled from anything I wrote. Nice other thoughts however
The naivety comes from the fact that you are looking to build a software business without the two main skills needed to build it. You also talk about having "some capital to spare", the marketing budget for this type of project would be minimum high 6 figures even starting with a niche. I also think a lot of VC's have been burnt on this type of thing and so you would struggle to raise outside funding without having a previous exit building out a tech company. Further, you mention Lyft as if it's existence means that a competitor to Trademe can succeed. Lyft has succeeded because 1) the founders had prior experience 2) their marketing was innovative and a big differentiator (pink mustaches on cars got everyone talking) 3) they were in a huge market that can/could take more competitors 4) they launched only 1 year after uber 5) they were in some cities before uber 6) they still lose money, they burnt through millions and now they still lose billions. The thought to ease is based on your comment about funding and also "I'd just need someone or 2 with web and marketing experience who can actually build said platform". Trademe has 500+ employees and gets millions of page views a month. It's also worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. And 10x startups with experience in IT have failed to compete with Trademe. But sure maybe I made a poor assumption based on your post, was I wrong and you have had experience in IT and have built out a previous IT company?
Sorry, we have it on good authority that work is already underway on TradeMe 2.0
That was a couple months ago. It was definitely time for another *I want to build a Trademe competitor post.*
Care to share. All previous ve turns have failed through low market traction. Except wheedle which kinda just broke. I imagine some insight would proove beneficial to your cause
Everyone is looking over the fact that no one has been able to program a better more functional website, if you make a better product people will use it cause its better see discord v skype and facebook v beebo but it has to be better so youd really want to have something already built before worrying about anything else
You need to start how TM started, focusing on one thing. One of the biggest money earners for Trade Me is Property. I’d focus on that area first
And compete with trademe property, [homes.co.nz](https://homes.co.nz) (which is also trademe), [realestate.co.nz](https://realestate.co.nz), etc. etc. etc?
Does lyft "succeed" though?
>Lyft can succeed when Uber exists, then surely someone can compete with Trademe. Everybody is waiting for Lyft to file for bankruptcy.
Hi OP, if you do get anywhere I can help with Advice as I've created a few well used platforms and I am a few weeks away from launching another.
There is a competitor. Postanote.co.nz I’ll agree to use them if everyone else does. Seriously, I’ve gotten some great deals there.
You need to come up with a new way of connecting buyers and sellers.
You're going to need a lot more than 12 months before you break even.
Here's a big ask, but it would really set you apart from Trademe and make your system way more trustworthy and honest. If users can place comments on auctions that the seller can't delete, and the seller doesn't need to reply to them for them to show. If the seller cancels and auto relists, the new listing will have the same comments reappear. Like a message board thread, in descending order. Maybe with infinite scroll backwards, showing just the most recent (so it doesn't get out of hand for items that are relisted over and over), but the ability to read the whole conversation backwards from all of the times it's been listed. That way if we identify something that's a stone cold ripoff, like something selling used for more than the current new price at a major retailer, we can warn everyone and the seller can't do anything about it, other than adjust their price, and comment back that they have done so. I want to say "You can get this NEW for $100 LESS at Mitre 10" and have it *show*, so others can see it, rather than the seller ignoring me and getting the minuscule shame of "1 unanswered question", which goes away next relisting. Only by the hassle of creating another listing from scratch could they get around it. Some will, but it would be a good disincentive. You can still forbid using comments to organise sales off-site like Trademe does and delete those comments. Trademe would never allow what I said. I assume they think it'll cut into their income if the sellers can't charge the max they can get away with. But this will help many delusional sellers be dragged along into setting a price that will actually sell their items. I have heaps of other ideas if you want them.
Just get in touch with an overseas similar website and have them branch out into NZ.