Trade Me launches fashion website

6 April 2014

Trade Me launches fashion website

Online marketplace Trade Me has launched its new fashion website (trademe.co.nz/fashion), featuring a visual approach to browsing and new features like personalisation and advanced searching.

Trade Me chief operating officer Mike O’Donnell said the changes were overdue. “Our clothing section was looking a bit dated, and given that around 41,000 clothing items are sold there every week, we thought it was time for a makeover. For the last five months we’ve been refreshing and improving our clothing category and we’ve relaunched it as Trade Me Fashion.”

Mr O’Donnell said new features included a photo grid view, tools and attributes around size, colour and price, and the ability to purchase items shipped for free from the USA. “We have plenty more ideas for dressing up the fashion category on Trade Me and there’s still heaps of work to do, but it’s exciting to be providing a much better experience for Kiwi fashion buyers.”

For the first time Trade Me has also sent its team offshore to source items that people weren’t finding onsite. “We analysed what we call unrequited demand – the common searches that weren’t resulting in sales – and sent staff overseas to find suppliers of those goods. This has resulted in new American suppliers selling shoes, sunglasses and ski wear on Trade Me, as well as branded fashion from the likes of Dickies, Ralph Lauren, Guess and Aeropostale.”

Mr O’Donnell said Trade Me Fashion was “soft launched” to regular buyers a week ago and results had been encouraging. “It’s still too early to measure the impact on sales, but we’ve seen page views for fashion items increase 113% on the previous four-week average.”

THE DATA

1/ Statistics: clothing on Trade Me
300,000 items listed each week
41,000 items purchased each week
Over 2.1 million items bought in 2013
27% of all purchases by people aged under 30 were by mobile phone
62% of all items are new and being sold by professional sellers

2/ Top 10 clothing brand searches in March 2014

3/ Regional clothing brand searches by women in March 2014

4/ Regional clothing brand searches by men in March 2014

5/ Size: most common searches by gender & region

ENDS

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