Kiwianarama

Modern Life

Kiwis love a bargain. They love a bargain so much, that even the meagre 20 cent price to list an item on eBay seemed like a ‘bloody rip off’. So they invented TradeMe, which was not as fancy, but was marginally cheaper.  Unsurprisingly, it was an instant hit.

The website was created by Sam Morgan, son of Gareth Morgan, famous economist, motorcyclist, and international bald rights activist. Originally named TradeSheep, it was designed as a platform to allow the rural community to trade excess livestock for essential city goods such as flat white coffees and Philippe Starck chairs. Pretty soon, however, non-rural people were using it too, selling everything from used V8s Holdens to Swandris, puffy leather sofas from tasteless furniture discounters with shit ads to endless unwanted Dave Dobbyn concert tickets.

Following a brief legal battle over naming rights with Dutch interracial animal-porn site, SpadeSheep, TradeMe, as we know it today, was born.

It has become so wildly popular, that per capita, Kiwis are the most frequent users of any internet auction site in the world. Even the nearest competitor, Nigeria, has less than half the number of registered eBay traders per head of population (and they are world famous for legitimate online trading!).

Some quick TradeMe facts;

1. On average, every New Zealander has traded at least three times their personal net worth online, resulting, in 2008, in TradeMe posting a staggering gross turnover in the TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars! Easily smashing all known NZ company records.
2. With approximately 15 page views per day, TradeMe now accounts for 139% of ALL internet traffic in New Zealand! The website is so busy they have invested in a state of the art 14,400 US Robotics Fax-Data Modem to handle the increase in hits. This technology is understood to be the first of it’s kind in New Zealand, and is widely hoped to propel the country into the forefront of 20th century science.
3. National treasure and ten times winner of FHM’s annual “Stupid People We’d Like To F**K (Despite The Obvious Health Hazards)” gong, Nikki Watson, once auctioned a date with herself for charity, raising an impressive $4.83 for Poor Kids Without Legs.

In a perhaps sadly ironic twist of fate,  TradeMe was recently sold on eBay to Australia, who, it is understood, intend to use the website to swap sacks of copper and iron ore for bottles of New Zealand’s abundant supply of water, when the price of their minerals eventually crash.

But since that is at least a few years away yet, here are some helpful tips for trading on TradeMe;

1. If the item for sale in the photograph is blue, don’t ask what colour the item is.
2. When applying for a job, SMS grammar, such as “thnx 4t intRvw, c u l8r!” is not advisable.
3. Your old slippers may have a sentimental value of $199 to you, but a starting bid of 99c is probably more realistic
4. If offering ‘Buyer can pick up’ on, say, a $2 used book, try not to photograph the brand new 42inch plasma TV, the Blue Ray DVD player, or the mantelpiece where you keep all your diamond-crusted gold jewelery in the background.
5. Listing your shitty Christchurch bungalow that nobody wants at starting bids of 99c, in the hope that it’ll end up on Cambell Live, only works once, and it’s already been done. Twice.
6. Buying a pizza restaurant in a shitty Christchurch stripmall for $99, without doing due diligence on the $200,000 of debt, is not newsworthy, even if it also ends up on Cambell Live. It’s just stupid. Sooo f**king stupid.
7. Spending all day browsing TradeMe when you should be researching proper stories for your job as a journalist on Cambell Live, does not then mean it’s OK to then throw a segment together at the last minute based on an auction you saw on the site.