Trade Me is bidding farewell to some of its marketplace fees.
From March 10, sellers won’t have to pay a 7.9% success fee when they sell things like their couch, a dress, a lamp or a TV.
The platform said it wants to make it easier for Kiwis to declutter their homes, say goodbye to their second-hand stuff and get some extra cash in their pockets.
Trade Me introduced the success fees in the 2000s, when it was the country’s most-visited site with half a million daily visitors by 2009 and 52% of listings were second-hand.
Massey University professor and marketing expert, Bodo Lang, told The Front Page that TradeMe isn’t as front of mind as it once was.
“I think certainly Trade Me has been extremely popular, and it’s certainly suffered a little bit from increasing competition from other traditional online retailers,” Lang said.
“If you dial the clock back about 27 years, when I was working with the founder of Trade Me, it was very interesting. New Zealand was a different place.
“In 2026, we have not just online retailing within New Zealand, but we have online retailing globally and particularly from China and other Southeast Asian countries.
“New Zealand consumers now have an amazing choice, basically at their fingertips, and within a couple of days, maybe a week, they have access to the actual physical good.
“The marketplace has changed so fundamentally that I think it’s really important for established businesses like TradeMe to look at their business model, not just fee structures, and say: what are the trends?”
Lang said the company should aggressively market its dropping of the success fee because the likes of Facebook Marketplace has the added advantage of being embedded in people’s daily social media use.
“There might be some people, a proportion of New Zealanders who are logging on daily or weekly, but I think having that advantage really makes a big difference,” he said.
“And so I think you need to get people back on site. And I think talking about fees, lower fees, most Kiwis will save money. Those messages need to spread well beyond Trade Me’s own website.”
To enhance security, Trade Me is also removing bank transfer as a payment option. Bank transfers were involved in 90% of all unresolved scams in 2025, it said.
However, Trade Me is keeping fees on the remaining online payment option, its own Ping system (it does allow the credit system Afterpay to be used for payment).
Every purchase made with Ping is covered by Buyer Protection. This means if an item doesn’t turn up as described, or doesn’t arrive at all, buyers can be refunded up to $5000.
Ping comes with a 2.19% transaction fee for the seller, but any trades below $20 will be free.
In a recent Trade Me survey of over 4000 Kiwis, trust and low fees came out on top as the most important factors when it came to choosing an online marketplace.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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