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White noise on Trade Me
As All Whites mania subsides (a little), we thought it might be interesting to have a quick look at the fuss and fanfare driven by our much-celebrated national football team over the past few weeks.
Taking a look at the graph below (click to expand), the peak of interest in terms of searches came the day of the team's superb effort to draw 1-1 with Italy in the dead of the night a week ago. Clearly, Kiwis were showing solidarity with the team, and plenty added their support after an extraordinary effort by the men in white against the reigning world champions.
The top 10 All Whites-related searches over the past couple of weeks are here:
- All Whites shirt
- All Whites jersey
- All Whites bra
- All Whites football
- All Whites scarf
- All Whites signed
- All Whites flag
- Nike All Whites
- All Whites poster
- All Whites shorts
The most unusual item on the list is of course Tracey's "piece of New Zealand sporting history" in the bronze medal position. As well as making the papers, the world's most famous black bra also featured in The Daily Telegraph's World Cup coverage.
If you're keen to add this quirky piece to your sports memorabilia collection, you'll be in for a late night: it closes in the witching hour tomorrow morning.
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Our new bulk listing tool has arrived!
We’ve created a free listing tool, called My Products, to help you easily manage bulk inventory if you sell a lot of items on Trade Me. It automatically manages auctions, so you can run your business more smoothly. We’re making it available to everyone, but we think it will be particularly handy if you’re selling multiple items that are identical or closely related.
Here’s some of the cool stuff that My Products allows you to do:
- import and update listings in bulk
- assign a custom SKU/product code
- set a product to relist and/or automatically send a fixed price offer
- set an end time for automatically relisted auctions
- use auto-billing to ensure your products continue to list, even when your Trade Me account is in debt
China visits Trade Me
A group of Chinese young leaders visited our Wellington office last week to find out about Trade Me’s experiences of e-commerce in New Zealand, and compare this with the bevy of online marketplaces in China.
The visit was part of the first ever NZ-Sino Youth Exchange, a programme that brings together a handful of young leaders from New Zealand and China. In October last year, five young Kiwis headed over to China, with the help of Asia:NZ and the magnificently named China People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, and last week saw the reciprocal visit to New Zealand.
Before coming up the lift to Trade Me, our Chinese visitors had already visited dairy gurus Fonterra and bee product experts Comvita, touched Oscars at special effects maestros Weta, met a couple of Government ministers, and had a taste of Maori culture in Rotorua.
Bowen Pan was one of the Kiwi group who went to China in 2009 and is now on the staff at Trade Me where he is in our strategy, finance and analytics team. He took this week off work to hit the road with the Chinese delegation.
Bowen says the exchange is about developing friendships and networks across the business, education and government sectors. “The New Zealand government is investing heavily in China to help Kiwi firms do business in China. One example is New Zealand Central, a $40m project in Shanghai that aims to be a ‘home base’ for New Zealand businesses.”
Thanks to our Chinese visitors for making it in to Trade Me for a chat, and a look around our neck of the woods.
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Let's not rename Queen's Birthday
Over the long weekend we asked visitors to our Community page what they thought of the New Zealand public holiday that falls on the first Monday in June. More than 1700 people let us know their innermost thoughts. There wasn’t a hell of a lot for the Republican movement to get excited about with the results: 56% of Kiwis preferred to retain the status quo. Another 26% were happy to have it called anything under the sun, just as long as they got a day with their feet up on the La-z-boy. Of those that were keen for a change, Matariki (aka Maori New Year) led the way with 9% of votes, followed by Sir Edmund Hillary Weekend with 5%. In terms of the battle of the sexes, it was roughly a 50/50 split between men and women who voted in favour of the “no change” and “day off” options, but a lot more women than men were keen on the Matariki idea (outnumbering them 2 to 1). In a nutshell: it looks like a long, hard slog to convince most New Zealanders that something other than Queen’s Birthday Holiday should be appearing on kitchen calendars across the nation.
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Database dig: Browsers and Operating Systems
Daniel is one of our developers - not only does he help bring new features, he also compiles these web browsing and operating system stats for us to look over. You can follow him on Twitter over here.
There are many, many different web browsers out there, and we keep a careful eye on their popularity with our members. This is how we determine the browsers used for testing Trade Me changes. Not all browsers are created equal, and the newer ones have lots of sweet stuff that we can use to bring you a better user experience. It’s quite interesting to us web development guys and gals, so we thought we’d share it.
Here at Trade Me, Internet Explorer is by far the most dominant player - over 62% of you visit Trade Me powered by one of its versions. But this May, for the first time ever, Internet Explorer 6 went below the 5% mark. Compared to the rest of the world, us Kiwis are doing pretty well in getting rid of the nine-year-old browser (based on NetApplications stats, 17% of the world is still using IE6). More...
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