20 Million Web Auctions Predicted For 2004

Thursday 22 January 2004

20 Million Web Auctions Predicted For 2004
As Kiwis Get The Online Auction Bug

New Zealanders will undertake 20 million online auctions in 2004, more than three times the 2003 figure according to online marketplace, Trade Me.

“By the end of 2003 New Zealanders were initiating around 600,000 online auctions a month, which gives an annualised figure of 7.2 million auctions a year,” said Trade Me director, Sam Morgan.

This represents a two and a half fold increase during the space of 2003, making it one of the fasted growing online auction economies in the region.

“We confidently expect the yearly figure to triple to 20 million online auctions in 2004 as the online network effect really takes hold.”

The high degree of population concentration in a handful of cities together with New Zealander’s willingness to adopt new technology has seen online trading prosper locally.

The plunging US dollar has also had an impact with increasing numbers of US-based sellers auctioning items on New Zealand websites. The most popular auction categories in 2003 were computers, collectables and mobile phones.

“We expect New Zealand to really start to show up on the radar screens of global players in 2004 with more global online businesses setting up shop. Certainly we expect to see global business along the lines of Amazon, Yahoo and Ebay set up local operations to take advantage of this high propensity to trade online. ”

This growth in local online trading saw Trade Me grow by 979% in 2003, making it the second fastest growing company in New Zealand according to the Deloitte Fastest 50 awards.

The latest Red Sheriff figures show Trade Me had over 615,000 unique visitors during December. The average time spent on the site was over 13 minutes, the longest of any of the top 20 websites.

ENDS

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