Crosslist from eBay to Trade Me — The Location Gate and the In-Trade Decision

On this page

• The location gate, first
• Casual or in trade — the decision that sets your fees
• What each one takes
• Formats, durations and the seven-day clock
• Field mapping, and the condition problem
• NZD, GST and the NZ$1,000 line
• Shipping, pick-up and rural New Zealand
• How to crosslist with FLUF Connect
• What syncs, and the withdrawal trap
• What it costs
• Sources and verification

The location gate, first

Before anything else, the rule that decides whether this page applies to you. Trade Me states it in one sentence: “To sell on Trade Me you must be located in New Zealand or Australia, or have specific written authorisation from Trade Me.”

That is not a formality you click past. There is no self-service route for an overseas seller — written authorisation is a discretionary decision Trade Me makes about you specifically. If you are a UK eBay seller reading this hoping to open a New Zealand channel this afternoon, the honest answer is that you cannot, and no crosslisting tool changes that.

Where this page is genuinely useful is the other case, which is more common than people assume: a New Zealand seller already trading on eBay — usually eBay.com.au or eBay.com, since eBay runs no New Zealand site — who wants their stock in front of the domestic audience too. Trade Me also adds an obligation for overseas sellers worth knowing: “When sending items from outside New Zealand, you must clearly outline in listings whether there will be any customs import duty on the listed item”, and all listings must comply with New Zealand law including product safety and labelling.

How FLUF Connect drives Trade Me is worth stating plainly, because it differs from most channels. Trade Me is a server-side channel here: the FLUF browser extension captures your own logged-in trademe.co.nz session once, at connect, and every per-listing call afterwards runs server-side against Trade Me’s API as you. You are not handing your catalogue to a third-party developer application; you are automating your own account.

Casual or in trade — the decision that sets your fees

This is the most consequential thing on the page and the part most likely to catch out an eBay seller expecting a free ride.

On 10 March 2026 Trade Me changed its Marketplace economics. In its own words: “From 10 March 2026, we removed the 7.9% Success Fee for casual sellers on Marketplace.” Alongside it, Ping went onto every listing with a 2.19% transaction fee to the seller, bank transfer was removed as a payment option, buyer protection on Ping and Afterpay purchases rose from $2,500 to $5,000, and a Service Fee was introduced for buyers on casual listings.

Then the sentence that matters to you: “We no longer charge Success Fees for casual sellers. Success Fees still apply for in-trade sellers, but your buyers won’t pay a Service Fee.”

So which are you? Trade Me publishes the test, and the Commerce Commission enforces it. Trade Me’s criteria for being in trade include whether you “regularly or habitually offer to sell goods or services online”, “make, buy or obtain goods with the intention of selling them”, are GST registered, have staff helping manage your sales, or have set up a company or other trading vehicle.

An eBay seller with a store, a supply line and consistent turnover meets several of those on the first reading. And Trade Me does not leave it entirely to you: “where it is clear given the volume, value, and consistency of your trading on Trade Me, that you’re ‘in-trade’, Trade Me reserves the discretion to turn on the in-trade label on your behalf.” Once switched on, “your membership will permanently show you as in-trade”.

The legal weight behind it is real. Trade Me: “If you’re selling items in-trade, the law requires that you disclose this… If you don’t, the Commerce Commission can fine you.” The Commission’s own guidance says “by law, anyone offering goods or services for sale online must make it clear to consumers that they are in trade”, and it has convicted and fined a seller with more than 1,300 Trade Me listings for failing to do so. Declaring in trade also brings your buyers the protections of the Fair Trading Act and the Consumer Guarantees Act.

The commercial consequence is straightforward: the headline “no more success fees” is not for you. Plan on the in-trade schedule.

What each one takes

Trade Me’s in-trade rates are set by category, and the spread is wide enough to matter:

Read that as a warning about category mapping. The same laptop is 5.9% filed correctly and 9.9% or worse filed lazily. On eBay a bad category costs you impressions; on Trade Me it costs you money on every sale.

Then there are the optional extras, and Trade Me’s timing on them is unforgiving: they are charged “as soon as your listing goes live”, whether or not it sells, and again on every relist. Subtitle $0.55, a 10-day auction $0.25, a scheduled end time $0.25, a reserve $0.25, a second category $0.99, gallery placements from $0.55 and feature placements from $3.45. None of them are contingent on a sale.

One thing we cannot tell you is whether those Trade Me figures are quoted inclusive or exclusive of GST — Trade Me does not say on the fees page, and we are not going to guess on a number that changes your margin by 15%.

Formats, durations and the seven-day clock

Trade Me offers three formats. Auction, which requires a start price and may carry a hidden reserve, an optional Buy Now available until the reserve is met, and an optional Make an Offer. Buy Now only, including the multiple-quantity listing, where you set a Buy Now price and leave start price and reserve empty. And Classified, where the buyer contacts you directly, used for pets, heavy machinery, Motors, Property, Jobs and Services.

Auctions auto-extend: “If a bid is placed within the last two minutes of an auction, it will auto-extend by two minutes.” Sniping does not work on Trade Me the way it does on eBay, which changes how you set a reserve.

Two constraints will break a naive sync. Trade Me is explicit that “auctions can’t be changed to Buy Now only or MQL, and vice-versa”, and that “MQLs can’t be edited after a sale has been made”. So a multi-quantity eBay listing, once it takes its first Trade Me sale, is frozen — no price change, no stock change, no description edit.

And the clock. General items run seven days by default, or ten for $0.25. That is the whole range on Marketplace. There is no Good ‘Til Cancelled equivalent, and no auto-relist on an ordinary Marketplace listing — auto-relisting is a feature of Trade Me’s separate My Products seller tool. Practically, an eBay catalogue that sits quietly on GTC for months becomes something you relist every week.

Field mapping, and the condition problem

The condition row is the one to think hardest about. eBay carries a graded condition vocabulary that buyers filter on. Trade Me’s general Marketplace listing contract carries a single boolean, IsBrandNew, defaulting to false and available on auctions. Everything from “used — excellent” to “for parts or not working” arrives on the same side of that line. Some categories reintroduce condition through their attribute set, so check per category rather than assuming — but plan on writing condition into the description, and be specific, because an in-trade seller carries Consumer Guarantees Act obligations to the buyer who reads it.

NZD, GST and the NZ$1,000 line

Trade Me prices in New Zealand dollars and nothing else. Its listing contract has StartPrice, ReservePrice and BuyNowPrice as bare decimals with a $0.50 minimum, and no currency field at all. Your eBay prices in AUD or USD are not Trade Me prices; they are inputs to a conversion that goes stale as the rate moves. Any price sync has to re-convert, and re-converting on every tick churns the listing — which, given that withdrawing an auction costs $3, is not free churn.

On eBay’s side, a US-registered seller pays a 3% currency conversion charge whenever eBay converts funds, plus a 1.65% international fee where the delivery address or the buyer’s registered address is outside the US. The same item genuinely carries different economics on each platform.

GST is the compliance piece, and Inland Revenue sets out both thresholds clearly. The rate is 15%. You must register if “your turnover was at least $60,000 in the last 12 months, or you expect it will be at least $60,000 in the next 12 months”. And for goods arriving from overseas, a low value good is “a physical good valued at NZ$1,000 or less, excluding GST” — below that line the marketplace or the seller charges GST at the point of sale; above it, GST and customs duty are charged at the border instead.

Note how the two systems interlock: being GST registered is itself one of Trade Me’s stated indicators that you are in trade. Crossing NZ$60,000 does not just change your tax position, it changes your fee schedule.

Shipping, pick-up and rural New Zealand

Trade Me lets you attach up to ten shipping options per listing, and shipping options are mandatory on auctions. The types are Undecided, Pickup, Free, Custom and Trade Me’s own courier booking; a custom option needs a price and a method. Pick-up is its own enum — None, Allow, Demand or Forbid — which tells you something about the market.

That something is worth building around. On Trade Me, collection and cash are first-class rather than edge cases: cash is a supported payment method with no fee, and Trade Me exempts cash-on-pick-up from the buyer Service Fee entirely. A buyer who drives to you pays less than one who does not. That is a very different culture from cross-border eBay, and an eBay seller who defaults to postage-only is leaving a real slice of the New Zealand audience unserved.

The rural surcharge is real and catches out sellers who set a single flat rate. NZ Post states that “a rural charge applies when using any of our domestic parcel services to send to a Rural Delivery address”. We are not going to print an amount, because we could not read the current rate off NZ Post’s own rate finder — check it before you set a flat number, because a meaningful share of New Zealand addresses are rural.

How to crosslist with FLUF Connect

1. Confirm you are eligible. New Zealand or Australia, or written authorisation from Trade Me. Everything below assumes yes.
2. Connect eBay and import your listings into FLUF Connect — titles, descriptions, images, prices and stock in one catalogue.
3. Connect Trade Me. The FLUF browser extension captures your trademe.co.nz session once at connect; after that the work runs server-side. Make sure your Ping account has the right New Zealand bank account linked before you sell anything.
4. Decide your in-trade status deliberately rather than discovering it. If you are in trade, declare it — and price on the 5.9% to 11.9% schedule rather than the casual one.
5. Map categories properly, because the category sets the fee.
6. Cut your descriptions to 2,048 characters of plain text, and put the condition detail that IsBrandNew cannot carry into the top of it.
7. Set prices in NZD with the conversion, the fee schedule and the postage all accounted for, rather than converting the eBay number.
8. Push, then manage both from one dashboard, so a sale on either side is a single action.

What syncs, and the withdrawal trap

The practical rule that falls out of that table: if an item is live on both platforms, list it on Trade Me as Buy Now rather than as an auction. Withdrawal is free, there is no final-hour blackout, and you keep the ability to pull it the moment eBay sells it. Save the auction format for stock that lives only on Trade Me.

What it costs

FLUF Connect is £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month on Starter, covering 300 products. There is no free plan.

Relisting, offers and bulk operations are included in every plan rather than sold as add-ons. Relisting is the one that earns its keep here, because Trade Me’s seven-day default turns relisting from a convenience into a weekly chore.

Sources and verification

Checked against primary sources on 26 August 2026. Trade Me’s help centre, developer documentation and fee pages were read directly, as were eBay’s fee pages and Inland Revenue’s GST guidance.

• Trade Me — sellers outside New Zealand — the location requirement quoted above, the customs-duty disclosure obligation, and compliance with New Zealand law
• Trade Me — big changes for Marketplace — the removal of the 7.9% casual success fee from 10 March 2026, Ping at 2.19% on every listing, the removal of bank transfer, the buyer Service Fee, and buyer protection rising to $5,000
• Trade Me — Marketplace fees — the in-trade success-fee bands and the $499 cap, the Top Seller discount, the buyer Service Fee bands, the $3 auction withdrawal fee, and the optional-extra prices charged at listing time
• Trade Me — in-trade disclosure — the criteria, the Commerce Commission fine warning, Trade Me’s discretion to label you, the permanence of the label, and the NZ bank account linked to Ping
• Commerce Commission — buying on Trade Me — the legal obligation to disclose trader status and the conviction of a seller with more than 1,300 listings
• Trade Me — listing types — auction, Buy Now only, multiple quantity and classified; the two-minute auto-extension; and the rules that formats cannot be converted and MQLs cannot be edited after a sale
• Trade Me developer reference — list an item — the 80-character title, the 2,048-character plain-text description, up to 20 photos, the $0.50 price minimums, IsBrandNew, the Pickup enum, up to ten shipping options, the payment-method set and the requirement that Ping be enabled
• Trade Me developer reference — categories — the category tree and per-category attribute sets
• Trade Me — the Fair Trading Act — the Act applies to professional traders but not to one-off private trades
• eBay — selling fees — the final value fee percentages, the $0.30 and $0.40 per-order fees, the 250 zero-insertion-fee listings and $0.35 thereafter, the 1.65% international fee and the 3% currency conversion charge
• eBay — store selling fees — the store tiers and listing allowances
• Inland Revenue — GST and registering for GST — the 15% rate and the NZ$60,000 turnover threshold
• Inland Revenue — GST on low value imported goods and the marketplace rules — the NZ$1,000 definition and when the marketplace rather than the seller accounts for GST
• NZ Post — rural charge — that a rural charge applies to domestic parcel services
• Apax Partners — Trade Me — ownership, and Trade Me described as New Zealand’s leading online classifieds and marketplace platform, founded 1999

Where a figure could not be traced to the organisation that sets it, this page leaves it out. That includes Trade Me member or listing counts, whether Trade Me’s published fees are GST-inclusive, the price of a Choice by Trade Me subscription, Motors, Property and Services fee schedules, Trade Me’s exact relist window, the amount of NZ Post’s rural surcharge, and any market-share comparison between Trade Me and its rivals. Trade Me’s own documentation is also inconsistent in places after the March 2026 changes — the overseas-sellers page still refers to “Pay Now” while the payments pages describe only Ping, Afterpay and cash — so expect stale corners and check anything load-bearing in your own account.

Related guides

• Sell on Trade Me — the complete seller guide
• Sell on eBay — the complete seller guide
• Crosslist from Trade Me to eBay — the same pair, the other way round
• Crosslist from Trade Me to Shopify
• Crosslist from Trade Me to Facebook Marketplace
• All crosslisting routes