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...

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 ...

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 th...

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 too...