What’s a good marketplace alternative? TradeMe sucks. I’m quitting Facebook. The grocery store bulletin boards are pretty sparse these days. Where to get things 2nd hand?
Marketplace had so much potential but it's full of scammy arse holes, trade me has like a $10 minimum that you have to bake into the price of each listing just to cover the sneaky fees they charge
Weirdly, the current options seem so hopeless that maybe there's space in the market for someone to create a new buy/sell website and/or app, not unlike what Sam Morgan did with Trademe a long time ago.
I don't know, there's been a few that have tried and they've all failed. Zillion, sella, allgoods.. probably some others that I can't remember. I think the problem is everyone wants fast, large userbase, no ads, no international sellers, no or low fees, without realising that it's not really possible, I'm pretty sure even Ebay's selling fees are higher than Trademe's. Some one can correct me if I'm wrong, I've not sold on Ebay before.
To be honest every time I've looked at ebay it's seemed so full of clutter I've struggled to figure out what was going on.
And yeah the critical mass is a big thing. Back in the early 2000s or whenever it was, I remember Sam Morgan was doing stuff like gluing ads to street lamps around town just to get people to look at Trademe. Maybe he got in at the right time. Ebay had already proved the model worked and lots of people wanted it, but it hadn't bothered to enter the NZ market.
It's not as if there weren't alternatives because the huge way of selling stuff then was newspaper classifieds, but Trademe was virtually free in comparison and made it much easiest to list things.