No Success Fees for Cars and Houses
The fee structure for listings in the 'Cars, Boats & Motorbikes' and 'Houses and Sections for Sale' categories are going to change from a percentage based success fee,
to a fixed success fee regardless of the final bid price. For a limited time, there will be NO SUCCESS FEES for listings for cars, bikes, moterbikes and houses. An announcement will be made when the fixed fees are introduced later in the year.
Change to authentication rules
As Trade Me continues to grow, we need to be continually introducing ways to deal with fraud, piracy and other types of unwanted behaviour.
In future weeks we will be introducing new features to improve security on the site and keep the quality of behaviour at its current level. With this in mind the following changes have been introduced:
Unauthenticated members now have limited use of some of the features on the site. These include:
- The question and answer feature is for authenticated members only.
- The auction complaints feature is for authenticated members only.
- Unauthenticated members may place bids on only 3 auctions at a time
- Unauthenticated members may not place bids of over $100.
- Unauthenticated members may not run more than 4 auctions at a time.
- Registration now requires gender, birthdate, and land line phone number
- Authentication now requires additional information birthdate, gender, land line phone number, drivers licence or bank account number.
- A multiple star rating system has been introduced. Members with over 10 positive feedbacks get 2 stars, over 50 = 3 stars, over 100 = 4 stars, over 200 = 5 stars, over 500 = a glowing star.
Site Changes
Member feedback
You can now only place feedback if you were the seller, winning bidder, or accepted an offer in an auction. This is to prevent abuse of the feedback system from people who haven't been involved in any transaction.
You can place feedback from any expired listing if you were involved.
Watchlist
The watchlist has been updated so that you can view all the options available to you (placing feedback, adding a note to the auction) in the same format as the listing pages for sellers.
View the watchlist by clicking wither of the links under 'My bids / watchlist' on the My Trade Me tab.
Fixed-price offer
If an auction closes below reserve, the seller can choose to offer the item to any or all of the bidders, at a fixed price. The first bidder to accept the offer wins. Standard success fees apply.
Leaderboard removed
The leaderboard has been removed for the time being, as it was becoming slow due to the number of calculations involved.
Site changes and new features
Subscribe to a category
You can now get the latest listings in a category sent to you via email. To subscribe, go to the appropriate category and click the new 'subscribe' button on the right hand side.
Sort a category by latest listings or closing soon
You can now sort category listings by closing soon, or by latest listings.
New search engine
There have been changes to the search engine. Previously, if you searched for 'new ram',
you would only find listings containing the exact phrase 'new ram'.
The new search engine will search for either or both words, and returns results ranked in this order:
- An exact match for 'new ram' in a listing title
- An exact match for 'new ram' in a listing description
- Both the words 'new' and 'ram', but not next to each other. Eg: 'new 128Mb Ram'
- Listings with either 'new' or 'ram' but not both
- Listings with words containing 'new' or 'ram' Eg: 'newspaper', 'ramstein'
You will now get a lot more results from your searches, with the most relevant ones at the top of the list.
Buy and sell tabs, new "run an auction" page
We have added these 2 new tabs to make it easier to find what you're after, or sell something on the site.