Professional sellers
Understanding your sales summary and listing allowance
Learn how to make the most of Trade Me by getting to know your sales summary and how listing allowances work.
Sales summary
Your sales summary shows your last 6 weeks of trading, with a breakdown of your sales. ‘Total purchases’, ‘Value of sales’, and ‘Sell-through rate’ are the ones to keep an eye on – they link in with Top Seller criteria.
It’s worth noting that the sell-through rate calculated for Top Seller status isn’t an average of the last six week’s percentages, but is calculated by the total purchases divided by the total purchases plus total unsold listings. I.e. total purchases / (total purchases + total unsold listings).
Listing allowance
Your allowance is the number of general Marketplace listings you can run at any one time – for free. Every member has a minimum free allowance of 50.
To work it out, take your highest number of weekly sales from the past six weeks, and multiply by five. That’s your listing allowance. If you sell more than 10 items per week, your listing allowance will increase.
Can I buy a higher allowance?
Sort of. Your allowance can be exceeded at any time, for a fee per listing. It’s not possible to buy a permanent or ongoing higher allowance though – it will always be calculated by your sales.
Exceeding your allowance costs $0.10 for each new listing created or relisted, once your allowance has been reached. But this doesn’t change your allowance – it’ll stay the same.
In short, the only way to get a higher allowance is by increasing your sales.
High-volume listing fees
Any listing created over your listing allowance is charged a high volume listing (HVL) fee of $0.10. We have this in place to prevent the site from being flooded with items that don’t perform so well.
If you plan on hitting your listing allowance, you might want to be strategic about your listing setup to minimise your HVL fee spend. One way to do this is to set up your auctions so to all end that the same time – bringing you back below your allowance – before they all relist.
Alternatively, you might want to consider a more focused inventory, or factoring these fees into your budget to absorb the cost.
If you’re ever unsure about these costs or if you want to know more, check out our HVL help page.
