?? Service Fee ?? Spotted this on a listing, never seen before

Hello Diana. A trial affecting some items. 

Read about it here

How would I know if I was part of this experiment?

Hello Amy. You can either log out and look at your items, get someone else to check them, or post an auction number here and someone can check for you. 

So no email to advise I'm part of an experiment? Is the experiment to see if anyone notices additional fees to their items?

Kia Ora Amy,

The Service fee trial period ended on 11 October 2025. - It will be to determine the viability of charging a service fee to Buyers full time - Cheers.

I saw the fee appear on some listings while I was browsing - a few items I would have purchased otherwise but didn't because of that fee.

It appeared on some of my listings as well, had an irate email from a lady I'd sold to before asking me why I was charging a service fee now!  Had to quickly explain it wasn't me doing it.

Are you attempting to kill Trade Me? 

Changes made to the desktop version today which make it near impossible to manage sales (removal of the search function  and filters to check who needs to pay) and now charging a service fee to buyers! Both sellers and buyers are going to walk. You can only push so many buttons before all goodwill is lost. 

Kia ora Caroline, I've passed on your feedback. The ability to search a trade reference or a buyer username from your Sold folder is not available on our new look, and as as this page has been permanently updated there isn't a way to get back to our old site, I'm sorry.

You can search for a keyword like a trade reference or a username by pressing 'Ctrl + F' your keyboard if you're on a desktop. If you're accessing our website from a mobile device, you can use the 'Find in page' option from the three dots in the top right of your browser.

If you have a large number of listings to manage, it may be best to use a listing tool like My Products. This is designed for regular listers and has the functionality to search Sold listings. You can read more about this on our My Products guide.

Having worked in the tech industry for 30 years, I find it difficult to believe that the recent changes at Trade Me are purely due to incompetence. In my experience, no team could implement changes this detrimental without it being intentional. It’s hard to accept that basic features like Search for Sales or filtering out non-paying buyers couldn’t be maintained—unless there was a deliberate reason. The overall direction suggests these changes are designed to make the platform less seller-friendly, possibly to push users toward using Ping for payments, which would benefit Trade Me financially.

You’re also promoting "My Products" again. Can you confirm whether there are plans to charge for it in the future? I’ve used it before and found it to be extremely poor in performance and usability.

Additionally, I noticed last night when relisting unsold items that there is no longer a warning when you exceed your free listing allowance—something that was previously in place. That lack of notification feels misleading. What other little tricks have you put into the system to extract money from us. 

Overall, these changes are not improvements. There’s a clear lack of transparency, and it’s disappointing to see the platform moving in this direction. This was a trusted NZ brand, but the new owners seem to have forgotten this. And with that comes hopefully the opportunity for another player like Ebay to enter the market here. There is no longer a Gareth Morgan threatening to run Trade Me at a loss to stop them entering the market.