Trade Me Trials Wholesale Auctions

Tuesday 29 November 2005

Trade Me Trials Wholesale Auctions

Trade Me Motors is to trial wholesale auctions for car dealers with its first dealer-only auction going live next week.

Trade Me Motors is New Zealand’s largest automotive marketplace, selling an estimated 300 cars every day. It has more visitors than all other automotive websites combined1.

“We announced last month that we were interested in expanding our interests from the retail market to the wholesale market,” said Trade Me general manager Sam Morgan.

“We’ve now built a complete wholesale market (where manufacturers and importers sell to dealers) and will be running our first closed auction next week. It features 351 cars being offered up to registered dealers.”

“Currently wholesalers pay around $350 per car in traditional auction houses and then buyers pay a similar amount in buyer’s premium, resulting in overall costs of around $700. We’re offering a similar service for $99 to the seller and at no cost to the buyer, which will effectively slash $600 from the final price of a car available to consumers.”

Trade Me is trialling the service with its joint venture partner AutoBase. Enrolments for dealers close on Friday 2 December. The auctions will run from Monday to Thursday. Over 110 dealers have already pre-enrolled for the market.

“The trial will be a learning exercise for us. If it’s successful we’ll look at converting it to a regular business line for Trade Me.”

The latest Nielsen//NetRatings figures show Trade Me had over 2 million unique NZ visitors in September. It has over 1 million New Zealand members and more than 500,000 listings.

ENDS

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