Professional retailers encouraged to offer free shipping

Media Release
Trade Me change encourages professional retailers to offer free shipping

Trade Me has announced a change to its success fee model for professional retailers that aims to increase the number of items offering free shipping in its Marketplace.

The change will see success fees for professional retailers apply to both the item sale price and the shipping cost, from 14 March. Trade Me Marketplace’s Rick Davies said the move would encourage more of Trade Me’s 19,000 professional retailers to provide buyers with free shipping and transparent prices.

In addition, New Zealand-based professional retailers who provide free and fast shipping to buyers will also be entitled to a 10 per cent rebate on their success fees from 14 March. “We want to help Kiwi sellers stay competitive within the global ecommerce market and provide them with an additional incentive to provide free shipping,” Mr Davies said.

The change does not affect casual sellers, who will continue to pay success fees only on the item sale price.

Better for buyers

Mr Davies said Trade Me was “on a mission” to improve the buyer experience for members. “Buyers have told us high shipping costs are their number one annoyance when buying on Trade Me, especially when purchasing a new item. We want to provide a world-class shopping experience.

“The expectations of Kiwis shopping online have soared in the past few years and we don’t want our professional retailers lagging behind. Things like fast, free, tracked shipping and no delivery fee surprises at checkout are table stakes in 2018.”

Mr Davies said he expected the number of new items on Trade Me with free shipping to increase. “More than a million items on Trade Me already include free shipping – it’s a good start, but with our new goods range of almost 4 million items and growing every day, we want to see the proportion with free shipping increase rapidly over the next 12 months.”

The change was also set to deter ‘shipping shock’ at checkout. “We see some opportunistic sellers reducing their item prices, then loading up the shipping fees which freaks buyers out when they come to pay,” Mr Davies said. “We want our marketplace to be easy and transparent for buyers and we also expect sellers to sell more when buyers know what they’re paying upfront.”

Other buyer-focused initiatives

He said the upcoming change was the latest move to make buying safer, faster and cheaper on Trade Me. “With more buyers opting to purchase new items, we’ve focused a lot of effort on making this easier including launching Buyer Protection, joining forces with Afterpay for instalment payments, and experimentation with subscription-based free delivery.”

The latest shipping experiment was dubbed Project Santa and Mr Davies said the results were very positive. “It’s no surprise New Zealanders love free shipping and more than 90 percent of our Project Santa subscribers said they would sign up again which is very encouraging. We’re working on the next iteration, so watch this space.”

-ends-

More information:
• Professional retailers are also known as ‘in-trade’ sellers and comprise around 3 percent of sellers on Trade Me

© Scoop Media