TABLE OF CONTENTS

Overview

Trade Runner is a handy app designed to make selling on www.trademe.co.nz easier by automating the creation of listings and sending orders back to your ecommerce store for fulfilment.


When you install the app, it will import the products from your ecommerce store into Trade Runner. You can then choose which products you want to list on Trade Me.


You can also make changes to your products in Trade Runner without changing the products in your ecommerce store. This allows you to change details such as the price or product titles to have the best chance of making sales on Trade Me.


Product listings and inventory on Trade Me are kept in Sync with your ecommerce store via full product syncs and individual product/inventory updates as they happen (depending on your ecommerce store).


Dashboard

The dashboard of Trade Runner summarises your Products and Orders. The Products section shows at a glance, how many products are listed or not listed, and why.


The orders section will give you a summary of orders received and also notify you of any order issues that you need to look at.


You can also see a list of your top selling products on Trade Me.


Product syncing

If your ecommerce store is Shopify, BigCommerce or WooCommerce 

  • Trade Runner will do a full sync of all products once every 7 days, usually on a Saturday night around midnight. All product information such as price, inventory, description, images and title are updated.
  • In between the full sync, products and inventory are kept up to date in almost ‘real time’. If you change the inventory Trade Runner will update the product listing on Trade Me.
  • The weekly full sync and ‘real time’ updates ensure all products are kept up to date.


If your ecommerce store is Magento (this applies to v1 and v2)

  • Trade Runner will do a full sync of all products once every day, usually overnight around midnight. All product information such as price, inventory, description, images and title are updated.
  • Trade Runner will sync inventory changes throughout the day every 20 minutes (at best) to 60 minutes depending on the number of products you have.Timing depends on Trade Me, the total number of products in Magento and the number of inventory changes you have. For example, if you have around 3,000 products with 200 products requiring an inventory update to Trade Me this will take around 15-20 minutes and will happen every 20 minutes provided the first inventory sync has completed.  


See related FAQs on Syncing 


Managing and listing products 

How to List Products

  • To list a product on trademe.co.nz you need to map it to a Trade Me category (i.e choose a Trade Me category to list the product in).
    For more information on how to do this, see the Category Mapping FAQs.
  • Note: You are not able to go live with listings until Trade Me enable you to start selling. This is to ensure you have everything set up before you have active listings.


How to Block Products

If you have products that you don’t want to list on Trade Me, you can block them. There are a number of ways to block (or unblock) products.

  • Single products: To block products go to the Products page from the left hand nav. Search for the product(s) you want to block. Check the box then from the ‘Actions’ menu, choose Block all selected.
  • Block by Keyword: To block products by keyword, go to ‘Settings – Trade Me - General’ then scroll down to Product Exclusions.
  • Bulk Block: There is also a bulk block or unblock feature. Go to 'Products - Bulk Block'

    See related FAQs: Blocking 


How to End a Listing

  • To end a product that is listing on Trade Me, find the product and go to the page with the full product information. Scroll down and click the ‘End Listing’ button.
  • You can also block products that are listing and this will also end the listing on Trade Me.


Product Listing Errors

  • Sometimes, not all products will list on Trade Me. If we have tried to list your products but there is a problem Trade Me returns a validation error. Any errors are listed under ‘Errors’ in the Dashboard.

 

Stock Buffer

  • To ensure that you don’t have products listing and sold on Trade Me, we recommend using a stock buffer. You can set this up under ‘Settings – Administration’. If you have a stock buffer set up, then the quantity listed on Trade Me will be your inventory less the stock buffer.

    Related FAQ: Stock Buffers


Optimising products for Trade Me

Pricing

  • If you want to price your products on Trade Me differently to your ecommerce store (i.e increase or decrease the price) you can do so via the Promotions feature.
    From the left hand nav, select ‘Promotions – Add new’.
    You can apply a pricing rule to a group of SKU’s or all products.

    Related FAQs: Pricing and Promotions

 

Product Titles

  • To maximise your chance of sales on Trade Me, its recommended to optimise your Product Titles with keywords such as the brand name, colour, size and/or what the product is however, you may not want to add this type of information to your titles in your Ecommerce store.
  • In Trade Runner you can change an individual product title for Trade Me. Go to ‘Products – All Products’ and in the table on the right hand side you will see a column ‘Product Title on Trade Me’. Click the product title to edit and save.
  • You can also create a rule to apply a change to all product titles. Go to ‘Settings – Feeds’ and in the Product Name field enter the rule you want to apply.

    Related FAQs:  Customize Product Titles 


Product Description Template 

  • For all international sellers, (i.e shipping products to NZ form overseas) you will need to add a disclaimer to the description of every listing on Trade Me to advise customers that they may need to check for duty or taxes.
  • For example:  This item is sold by <Insert your store name>, an offshore business located in <your location>, and may incur NZ customs duty or tax. Find out more at http://trade.me/whatsmyduty
  • To add this to all your listings, go to ‘Settings – Trade Me – General’

    Related FAQ: Add to Product Description 


Orders

Trade Runner checks Trade Me for orders every 10 minutes. Once the order is made available Trade Runner will import it and send it through to your ecommerce store for fulfilment.


If Trade Runner is unable to send the order through to ecommerce, you will receive an email notification and a message will appear in the Dashboard under the Orders section on the right.
You will be able to click through to the order and see what the issue is and what you need to do to resolve it. For example, it may be as simple as correcting a mismatching postcode.


Trade Runner will check your ecommerce every 2 hours to see if the status of the order has changed to Shipped. Once the order has been marked as shipped in your ecommerce store, Trade Runner will then be updated.

Related FAQs: Orders 


Shipping

There are a number of different options available for shipping:

  • At a minimum, you need one shipping policy. You can charge any amount or you can make it free.
  • You can have up to 7 different shipping policies for a product
  • You can choose to charge or not to charge for additional items if a customer buys more than one product.
  • Weight based shipping; charge a different amount depending on the weight of your products.
    Note: If a customer buys more than 1 product, the shipping is calculated on each individual product, not as a total weight.
  • Using Product Groups, you can create a group of products (based on criteria such as weight, price, retailer or marketplace category and brand) and have a different shipping policy for each group.
  • Combined shipping: Based on a threshold e.g orders over $150 or buy 3 products offer free shipping. Trade Me will need to set this up for you.

    Related FAQs: Shipping


Payment methods

Using Trade Runner, you can offer Pay Now/Ping and After pay payment methods.


You must have a Pay Now/Ping account set up before you can start selling on Trade Me.


Currency conversions

If you’re a seller based outside of NZ, Trade Runner will first remove any taxes and then convert your price into NZ$ based on a daily exchange rate obtained from Yahoo.
However, you can choose to set your own exchange rate.

Related FAQs: Tax and Currency Exchange 

 

Trade Runner support

If you have any problems with Trade Runner, please visit the Support Section. There is a link directly to it from the left hand nav in Trade Runner.


If you can't find your answer in the support section and FAQs, you can raise a support request


Webinar Video

Below you'll find a 30 minute webinar to get an overview of how Trade Runner works. 


Topics covered:

  • Overview
  • Dashboard
  • Listing products on Trade Me
  • Product and inventory syncing
  • Optimising products
  • How currency and exchange rates work for international sellers
  • Managing orders and refunds
  • Shipping
  • How to get help