China visits Trade Me
A group of Chinese young leaders visited our Wellington office last week to find out about Trade Me’s experiences of e-commerce in New Zealand, and compare this with the bevy of online marketplaces in China.
The visit was part of the first ever NZ-Sino Youth Exchange, a programme that brings together a handful of young leaders from New Zealand and China. In October last year, five young Kiwis headed over to China, with the help of Asia:NZ and the magnificently named China People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, and last week saw the reciprocal visit to New Zealand.
Before coming up the lift to Trade Me, our Chinese visitors had already visited dairy gurus Fonterra and bee product experts Comvita, touched Oscars at special effects maestros Weta, met a couple of Government ministers, and had a taste of Maori culture in Rotorua.
Bowen Pan was one of the Kiwi group who went to China in 2009 and is now on the staff at Trade Me where he is in our strategy, finance and analytics team. He took this week off work to hit the road with the Chinese delegation.
Bowen says the exchange is about developing friendships and networks across the business, education and government sectors. “The New Zealand government is investing heavily in China to help Kiwi firms do business in China. One example is New Zealand Central, a $40m project in Shanghai that aims to be a ‘home base’ for New Zealand businesses.”
Thanks to our Chinese visitors for making it in to Trade Me for a chat, and a look around our neck of the woods.
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Let's not rename Queen's Birthday
Over the long weekend we asked visitors to our Community page what they thought of the New Zealand public holiday that falls on the first Monday in June. More than 1700 people let us know their innermost thoughts. There wasn’t a hell of a lot for the Republican movement to get excited about with the results: 56% of Kiwis preferred to retain the status quo. Another 26% were happy to have it called anything under the sun, just as long as they got a day with their feet up on the La-z-boy. Of those that were keen for a change, Matariki (aka Maori New Year) led the way with 9% of votes, followed by Sir Edmund Hillary Weekend with 5%. In terms of the battle of the sexes, it was roughly a 50/50 split between men and women who voted in favour of the “no change” and “day off” options, but a lot more women than men were keen on the Matariki idea (outnumbering them 2 to 1). In a nutshell: it looks like a long, hard slog to convince most New Zealanders that something other than Queen’s Birthday Holiday should be appearing on kitchen calendars across the nation.
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Database dig: Browsers and Operating Systems
Daniel is one of our developers - not only does he help bring new features, he also compiles these web browsing and operating system stats for us to look over. You can follow him on Twitter over here.
There are many, many different web browsers out there, and we keep a careful eye on their popularity with our members. This is how we determine the browsers used for testing Trade Me changes. Not all browsers are created equal, and the newer ones have lots of sweet stuff that we can use to bring you a better user experience. It’s quite interesting to us web development guys and gals, so we thought we’d share it.
Here at Trade Me, Internet Explorer is by far the most dominant player - over 62% of you visit Trade Me powered by one of its versions. But this May, for the first time ever, Internet Explorer 6 went below the 5% mark. Compared to the rest of the world, us Kiwis are doing pretty well in getting rid of the nine-year-old browser (based on NetApplications stats, 17% of the world is still using IE6). More...
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Daily deals coming soon
Soon, we’re going to launch daily deals on our homepage. Daily deals are discounted products offered for a fixed price within a 24 hour period. Stock will be limited for each product, and buyers may purchase by credit or debit card. This is a new section that won’t affect other categories. We're looking for suppliers who wish to market their products to over 2.5 million registered members. It’s open to everyone, but there are some conditions:
- Your product must have mass appeal and be offered at a substantially discounted price;
- You must have an excellent feedback record;
- We're looking for large volumes of new products, so minimum stock levels may apply.
Making sure the bright ideas work
Trade Me CEO Jon Macdonald recently penned this short piece in The Dom Post down here in the capital, as part of The Bright Ideas Challenge. If you've got a bright idea, you should get it in by 25 June.
It might have started out as a bright idea in Sam Morgan’s head, but one lesson from the Trade Me story is that there’s no shortage of bright ideas. The key is to bring the idea kicking and screaming into reality quickly, and then back it up with great operations and decision-making.
To help choose the best bright ideas and implement them well, we have a set of principles. There are seven in total, but four in particular are often front and centre when ideas are being batted around the pool table at Trade Me HQ. More...