Bidbud

Is it not working for you Kim? All seems OK here for me still. I guess I'm just lucky that I haven't yet come across any auctions that are incompatible. But they are out there, and probably growing. Here is the final word from Andrew if you haven't seen it already:

"Trade Me are making some big changes to how things work behind the scenes, some listings are using the new platform already. These listings cannot be bid on using BidBud, you have to bid manually on Trade Me. Going forward, this will likely be the end of BidBud. It's probably possible for me to update BidBud to handle the changes, however it would take a lot of my time - time I'm not interested in spending. Enjoy it while it lasts. edit: I've had a lot of emails about this, I'm not going to update BidBud to handle the changes, it's not worth my time. I'm sorry if this is inconvenient for you, but I'm not going to change my mind, even if you offer me money. I'm not interested in money, I'm interested in fun, and this isn't fun for me any more. "

Just found out about this myself. Don't use it for bidding but its been essential for listing and managing my auctions. Really wondering if I can go back to using Trade Me without the Bidbud interface, navigating endless screens was doing my head in. Absolutely can not understand why the Trade Me designers can't learn something from the Bidbud design- why would you want to use six screens to create or edit a listing when you can do it on one? It's my desperate hope that there's someone else like Andrew out there who will take on the challenge.

Hi Rachel. If it's ease of listing you want you can use Trade Me's free listing tool "My Products" This enables you to create a listing on a single page. It also has other benefits like automating relisting and FPOs. You just set and forget.

Okay, thanks. If it comes to the crunch I'll try that.

Can it simplify editing? I tend to do a bulk quick relist and then change duration individually while double-checking postage (which keeps changing). Again all on one page with BB, but I had to page through several screens prior.  I will also miss the ease of viewing - all my listing in one list, with all the info I value on one line for each auction. 

Yes, you can edit items, including duration, on the same one page without having to click through multiple pages.  

BidBud is what the Trademe experience 'should' be and would be if it were run for customers and not shareholders, clearly the plebs in marketing have more sway than engineers in this organisation.

The TradeMe UI has become so slow and bloated with Add popups that it's slowly becoming unusable, the need to have a 'clean and performative' interface (BidBud) is more critical now than ever before. I can't be the only person having to constantly manipulate the URL directly to make it even mildly useful.

The only shaft of light may be that the platform is so thoroughly useless as a paractical tool, it opens up the market to competition, after many iterations of failed starts - perhaps we will finally get some credible competition - but probably not!

Hello edit_window 

You shouldn't be getting any pop-ups on Trade Me unless you have malware on your device. 

There can be ads on the borders or banner, but you can stop those with a free adblocker if you don't like them.

Trade Me doesn't have any shareholders. It is privately owned. 

The way Trademe serves ads inside it's iFrames is using a popup method, the real issue is that it does not wait for the entire listing to resolve before displaying the Add, causing delays to the functional UI. I doubt many users of Trademe would rate the UI and being 'functionally rich' or 'responsive'.

Trademe is owned by a group of private equity partners, who all resolved back to VC and LLC holding companies of one form or another. All these companies have shareholders, just because the shareholders are private and not public does not change that, in fact it probably makes it worse as there is less accountability to the end customer. You may need to take a crash course in the meaning of 'shareholder' if your going to post on that topic, you may also want to be to check if your end user founded and runs IT companies before schooling them about malware and ad blockers, just saying. 😉

Just use ublock origin. It will block them at source. I use adblock+ just because I always have, and it works fine. But apparently ublock is the better option. 

edit_window, I'm so heartened to see someone else say what I've been thinking - about Trade Me being weak enough for a competitor to have a chance. Through these posts, I'm seeing people complain over and over about the same bugs, difficulties, and malfunctions, but they never seem to be addressed. Instead the site is fussed and primped and 'improved' beyond reason.

These 'inefficiencies' are not happening by mistake. I have ex staff and people I know in the dev team who are very capable and know what 'good' looks like. There are business reasons for revoking the fully functional 'free' API from the product, they want to ensure all traffic is channelled through their own UI, which purposefully makes it difficult for end users to easily search for 'exactly' what they want. The platform presents items in a way that are advantageous to large volume 'in trade' sellers and advertisers. It's also clearly driving revenue to the Ping platform where it takes a 'cut' by acting as a gateway intermediary. Having identified that customers are disheartened by the lack of true 'second hand' products available, due to social media platforms being more attractive to those sellers, they have tried to incentivise them back with free listings. Having closed one revenue stream, they have begun to 'default' the cost to the buyer through Ping. Over the next 12 months I would expect to see Ping become the only payment option for these private seller / second hand trades - follow the money to understand the business logic.

Unfortunately there have been dozens, if not hundreds of triers. Many are still limping along. There were some big names and big money thrown at it. One of the most high profile was Wheedle. They chucked $10million at it. Still failed. In my opinion Trade Me is too entrenched, and New Zealand too small to support more than one online auction marketplace. 

Well, the evidence to date certainly supports your perspective, and realistically there is little chance of this changing. There would really be no need for a change but for a: The ever-increasing costs of transacting on TM and b: The dysfunctional aspects on the UI. The cost side is straight business, and I would not expect any changes there.

Removing the ability of a product like BidBud to provide an alternative interface to the platform appears to be a chilling admission on the TM side that their UI is so weak they are threatened by a project created for free by one person. If TM learned from what users find so appealing about BidBud instead of crushing it, their product would actually become more entrenched against social platforms and potential future challenges IMO.

Seems like you "missed the memo" Ping (and cash) are already the only official way to pay for items on Trade Me now. 

Private sellers no longer pay success fees, so that is certainly a cost decline in transacting on TM, rather than an increase. 

Heartily agree though that Trade Me could learn from Andrew/Bidbud. Sometimes though it's just easier to create a website yourself, rather than when you have a team, all with an oar in the water. 

Don't forget though that all the back end stuff was done, so there was no need to program or create all that. Bidbud basically just presented it in a better way. 

Wouldn't it be nice if Trade Me itself "basically just presented it in a better way."