Over the last 12-18 months I have been partial to a little bit of constructive trademe criticism here on half-geek. Lack of web 2.0 type features and increases in trademe seller fees have been the crux of my sour grape posts. Today, however, I realized the error of my ways.....
I have 5 months left on the lease agreement for my apartment, however, I don't need it anymore. I need to get out of the lease. My property manager informed me that I must abide by the contract and arrange new tenants that comply at my own cost (advertising etc...). She says that it's a bummer for me that I need to go through this 3 weeks before Xmas as it will be hard to re let the apartment at this time.
So this morning at 11.47 I post a classified ad on trademe. My complaints about the 14 day listing fee of $59 or so dollars will prove to be short lived.....within 3 hours I have had a lady come through our apartment and place an application, contact the property manager and place a verbal agreement to take over our lease. Thats fast ROI, very fast.
If I were unaware of trademe (far fetched I know but stick with me) and someone had of suggested to me that they could re-let my apartment within 12 hours for under $60 I would not have hesitated in accepting such an offer.
My bad trademe, I forgot how powerful and cost effective you truly are.
The thing is that it's easy to give trademe a hard time when you don't really have a need for it. Over the past couple of years I have sorta fallen into that category. This got me wondering, how many kiwis have not used trademe yet?
There are only roughly 1.8 million trademe users in the total New Zealand population of roughly 4.8 million. So,while trademe are seriously dominant in the kiwi online space, there are still 3 million kiwis that don't use the service. Therefore, trademe must still move forward with an agressive online marketing strategy to ensure that they truly do replace the word e-commerce in the dictionary of kiwi slang.
If you want a lesson in online marketing strategy from trademe, look no further than this very post you are reading. If you are going to be successful in e-commerce, I mean big time successful, you need to have the ability to launch and implement tactics that will encourage people to recommend your website to other people. Tactics that generate online recommendations with links back to your site (such as blog posts) are particularly valuable as they increase your link popularity (crucial SEO factor).
In the case of trademe, they have mastered this very ability simply by being the best at the service the offer. Sure they are a monopoly, however, so were telecom new zealand and how many blog posts to you read by people who have had a problem with telecom only to have an extremely positive experience which changed their minds?
Possibly there are more users (i.e. buyer/sellers of Trademe than those actually registered. Many families, I'm sure would directly or indirectly use other member's accounts. So the number of Trademe users logged in, may be significantly lower than participating users - i.e those engaged in active trading...
Posted by: trademetips | March 29, 2009 at 03:08 PM