Pike River tragedy
Just a quick note from us about the Pike River coal mine tragedy. Our thoughts are with the families dealing with the awful events on the West Coast.
We are doing a couple of things to help out where we can. You should see banners encouraging donations to the Pike River Miners' Relief Trust across the site. Several Trade Me members are also running Pike River auctions with proceeds heading the way of the Trust, so we will be helping them out with fees and so on where appropriate too.
Trade Me has also made a donation to the Trust - and we'd encourage you to do the same. As well as the Trust's main site, there is also an official Facebook page to visit. More...
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Quick relist issue this morning
We just wanted to let you know that we experienced a technical glitch this morning with our quick relist option for general auctions. A fee of $14 was showing (but was not charged) when ‘quick relist’ was selected. This has been fixed and the correct fees will now display.
We’re sorry for any hassles this may have caused.
Helping Christchurch businesses on December 7
Just a quick heads up on a little initiative we're helping out with in Christchurch on Tuesday 7 December. This short piece appeared in
The Press today...
"Businesses struggling to cope with the aftermath of the earthquake will now receive special help - from Trade Me and The Press.
"The joint initiative will help businesses which cannot trade normally - often because their buildings have been damaged - to go online to sell their goods. More...
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Official Trade Me iPhone application out today
The first edition of Trade Me’s official iPhone application is out and about today. You can download it for free from Apple's App Store over here. We’ve released this app because we see this as an important platform to connect with, and something that will make Trade Me easier to use for a bunch of our members.
We know it has been a long time coming, but it's been a big job. We didn’t want to launch an app just because we could. We reckon building an app in itself is not particularly hard, but building a decent app certainly is. As well as all the QA work, beta testing, planning and coding, we've also been very keen to ensure the app feels like it is part of Trade Me.
It's great to have the iPhone app out hard on the heels of our API being released into the great wide open last month. It means we are starting to see a suite of applications interfacing with Trade Me and we think that’s a good thing. Of course, this is the first edition and it is not perfect. We'll be working hard to refine it for version 2 at some stage. More...
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Kiwi conquers auto-shopping on Trade Me
Want to buy the cheapest, most random stuff on Trade Me and have it delivered for free? One enterprising Kiwi has found a way to do just that.
Developer Paul Hunkin saw that we’d unleashed our API in September, freeing up our code for developers to dig in and have a play with building applications for members to use.
Inspired by a web comic strip, Paul set aside a couple of hours to write a script that automatically searches the site and bids on cheap, obscure items with Buy Now and free shipping (he’s recently updated it to also bid on items that are closing soon, to nab a bargain). More...