Trade Me Targets Wholesale Car Auctions

Tuesday 11 October 2005

For Immediate Release

Trade Me Targets Wholesale Car Auctions

Trade Me Motors celebrated its second birthday today by passing 32,000 car listings and announced its intention to take on traditional auctioneers in the lucrative wholesale car market.

Trade Me Motors is New Zealand’s largest automotive marketplace, selling an estimated 300 cars every day and having more vehicles listed than any other website, newspaper or magazine in the country. It has more visitors than all other automotive websites combined1.

“We’ve been delighted by the success of Trade Me Motors,” said Trade Me general manager Sam Morgan.

“Over the last two years we’ve seen both the number of vehicles and the average price grow strongly. Two years ago we had 5000 cars with an average price of around $5000. Today we’ve got 32,000 cars with an average price of $11,000.”

The site has also seen strong uptake by car dealers, with over 500 registered car dealers now listing their vehicles on Trade Me Motors, provided through a joint venture with Autobase.

“We sold nearly 80,000 cars through Trade Me Motors last year. Now it’s time to look at making the wholesale market (where manufacturers and importers sell to dealers) more efficient and to target dealer-only auctions”.

“Currently dealers pay around $350 per car to auction them in a traditional auction house. We think we can offer an equally good service for $99 a car. For a dealer network or importer putting 1000 cars through a year this amounts to over $250,000 savings, not counting savings in travel and storage. We figure this will get their attention.”

“This model is already proven and working well overseas and is simply waiting to be adapted to the New Zealand market.”

Trade Me is also looking at ways to extend its successful finance joint venture with UDC. All Trade Me cars feature direct links to UDC Finance, State Insurance, AA Inspection Services and VIR.

The latest Nielsen//NetRatings figures show Trade Me had over 2 million unique NZ visitors in September. It has over 1.2 million New Zealand members and more than 500,000 listings.
ENDS

1. Source: Nielsen//NetRating Unique Visitors Sept 2005 - Automotive Category

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