Current state of the auction software marketplace
November 12, 2008 – 2:29 pmWhile doing some market research for a client recently, we found ourselves uncovering some interesting data relating to the use of auction management software on TradeMe.
One example is the number of auctions listed using each tool. Since being released about a year ago, OMINS has grown in leaps and bounds. We’re extremely happy to have users ranging from the top two sellers on TradeMe to smaller professional sellers.
Taken from a snapshot of listings at 1pm today (12/11/2008), OMINS users have 20,426 auctions listed. In comparison, users of Auctionitis have 29,904 and users of TradeTool have 20,173.
This makes a total of around 70,500 auctions listed by automated software. This is 6% of all auctions on TradeMe! It’s great to see so many people see the advantage of introducing automation to their online business.
It’s also fantastic to see that OMINS lists 41% of the general listings on Sella. We’re unable to compare this number with other software as OMINS is the only system that supports listing on Sella.
Obviously we’re very happy with these numbers and look forward to revisiting things in a few months time to see how things progress! 
7 Responses to “Current state of the auction software marketplace”
Hi Guys
Cool post. Good to see someone else paying some attention to the numbers - the sooner Trade Me take notice of the numbers and provide some assistance in the form of an API or more accessible data - like providing extracts in XML format instead of hadr to manage CSV files - the better. Public discussion of the numbers can only help.
A couple of points:
I make the Auctionitis total to be a shade over 50,383 - quite a bit more than your total. The search results only return the first 2,000 matching auctions so that will probably explain the discrepancy.
Thats puts the number of automated items over 8% - a signifcant volume in anyone’s books.
Also your Auctionitis link (much appreciated
) doesn’t work.
Having this kind fo information in the pubic domain can only be a good thing - keep it up !
By Evan Harris on Nov 12, 2008
Hi Evan,
Thanks for your comment. I agree it’s good to get the numbers out there for people to see, although I’m not sure what effect it will have on TradeMe. I’m sure they can (and maybe do) track these things from their end anyway.
We didn’t use the standard search results number since it’s quite obviously wrong. If we did, we would have reported Auctionitis and Tradetool as listing only 2,000 auctions each instead of 29,904 and 20,173 respectively.
The way we extracted our numbers for Auctionitis and Tradetool is actually a little tricky without software (much like listing!), but there’s another way to confirm them:
1) Perform a search for “auctionitis” or “tradetool”
2) Count the totals on each of the parent categories (the bold ones). You’ll need to expand the column on the right to see all the categories. These will be slightly different to our reported ones since it’s counted at a different time, but it will be close.
Doing it this way and our automated way return the same results, which confirms them. I’m interested where you got your Auctionitis total from? Are you adding the child categories to the total as-well, because that will double-count most auctions and give an incorrect (inflated) result?
Also, I forgot to mention this in the original post, but the numbers for Tradetool are actually under-represented. Since Tradetool offers a “tag free” version of their software, a search will actually miss a decent chunk of their listings. My educated guess is that there’s probably another 8-9,000 auctions listed by Tradetool that are being missed by the search.
PS: I’ve fixed the Auctionitis link - bit of dyslexia I’m afraid.
By chris on Nov 12, 2008
I think you probably need to drill down another level. The 2nd level results aren’t reliable on larger numbers
I’d be surprised if 50% of the TradeTool users too off the tag, but hey
By Evan Harris on Nov 12, 2008
We don’t actually use that specific technique to get our numbers, although they do match what we get using the different (automated) technique.
Furthermore, we checked the OMINS listing count directly in our database, and also through the automated technique on TradeMe and the numbers matched. This makes us pretty confident that we have the correct numbers.
The 8-9,000 was only a guess; I figured roughly 30% of users could be “tagless” which I think is a fair estimate, but obviously it could be more or less than that - it’s impossible to tell. I guess that’s why I only included the confirmed results in the original post.
By chris on Nov 12, 2008
Well, my experience is the technique you mentioned earlier is unreliable, so I’d also wonder about any figure that matched it (at least any figure I didn’t produce and verify to my own satisfaction to be completely fair).
Still, an interesting topic and food for thought about just how many auctions are loaded using a tool. Whichever numbers are right.
By Evan Harris on Nov 12, 2008
We’ve done numerous tests, and are confident our results are accurate, but we’d be happy to compare our results with your own. In the interest of openness, would you mind posting your method here so we can check our results against your own?
I’ll also get in touch with our contact at TradeMe, and ask their opinion on the accuracy of the search counts.
By chris on Nov 13, 2008
Good to see you guys discussing this
the second level categories would be a problem for some things like DVDs, but otherwise would probably be accurate for most sellers.
Those users that do bother to turn off the tag tend to be bigger sellers so the percentage of listings would be much higher than the percentage of users.
By Andrew on Nov 24, 2008