Weirdly, the current options seem so hopeless that maybe there's space in the market for someone to create a new buy/sell website and/or app, not unlike what Sam Morgan did with Trademe a long time ago.

[–] eagleeyedtiger@lemmy.nz 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know, there's been a few that have tried and they've all failed. Zillion, sella, allgoods.. probably some others that I can't remember. I think the problem is everyone wants fast, large userbase, no ads, no international sellers, no or low fees, without realising that it's not really possible, I'm pretty sure even Ebay's selling fees are higher than Trademe's. Some one can correct me if I'm wrong, I've not sold on Ebay before.

[–] gibberish_driftwood@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be honest every time I've looked at ebay it's seemed so full of clutter I've struggled to figure out what was going on.

And yeah the critical mass is a big thing. Back in the early 2000s or whenever it was, I remember Sam Morgan was doing stuff like gluing ads to street lamps around town just to get people to look at Trademe. Maybe he got in at the right time. Ebay had already proved the model worked and lots of people wanted it, but it hadn't bothered to enter the NZ market.

It's not as if there weren't alternatives because the huge way of selling stuff then was newspaper classifieds, but Trademe was virtually free in comparison and made it much easiest to list things.

[–] eagleeyedtiger@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 year ago

If I recall Ebay did try to enter the market here in the early 2000's, however they didn't really localise anything and still operated in USD, so they didn't really take off. Ebay seems to be pretty popular in Australia though.

Doing some quick reading, apparently Trademe was financially struggling in the early days trying to survive off banner ad's and didn't really take off until they introduced success fees. As much as the average person doesn't want it, fees are pretty much the only way an auction site will grow big enough to compete. Otherwise they need some other way to subsidise the site, unless they're a massive company like Meta. Even then the lack of moderation on places like FB Marketplace means it gets full of scammers and bots with no way to verify which users can be trusted.