Trade Me rents out auction space

By RICHARD WOOD

Online auctioneer Trade Me has opened its website up to businesses to run branded auctions aimed at Trade Me's 85,000 members.

First up last month was Computer Disposals, trading as Dell Auctions, an Australian seller of "distressed" Dell Computer inventory.

Trade Me general manager Nigel Stanford said Computer Disposals had been putting up about five systems at a time. He said there had been a good mix of people getting bargins and the store getting good prices.

The company is also an agent for disposing of Acer brand computers and so an Acer store is about to be added to the site as well.

Negotiations are underway with three other businesses which Stanford could not identify but said involved well known brands.

He said the deals enable businesses to immediately access members of the site through the auction system and he expects larger businesses will also use it to drive traffic to their own websites.

There is a one-off fee, a monthly subscription and a requirement to put a certain amount of volume through the site.

Stanford said Trade Me does a basic check on the businesses as well.

Products auctioned by the business appear in the main auction listings along with all other auctions, but carry a logo to show it is a store listing.

Each trader gets their own website address in the form of www.trademe.co.nz/storename.

Stanford said he is not expecting the stores to flood the main auction lists.

"If we get 100 stores in the next quarter we will be happy.

"We are looking at an increase in the number of auctions by 400-500."

He said this model is different to what auction sites are doing overseas.

"Ours is more explicitly involving business."

Stanford said Trade Me has grown in the last three months with about 17,000 current listed auctions up from 8000 late last year.

"We made a few usability changes to the site to make things slightly easier and it went crazy," he says.

In January, for local websites, Trade Me was rated number two for page views by website monitoring service Hitwise, and number five for visitor numbers.

Trade Me also last month introduced oldfriends.co.nz.

This allows people to catch up with old friends they went to school with or worked with. It attracted 5000 users in the first four days, with no outside publicity, says Stanford. It is a free service designed to assist with traffic to the Trade Me site.

Trade Me

Old Friends