The Australian auction site has proven it is capable of being a viable alternative to eBay Australia with its latest results. OZtion now has over 275,000 members with 28,000 of these joining in the last 6 weeks. 14% (3,875) of the 28,000 signed up as sellers. Within the same period the site saw a 65% increase in the value of merchandise traded. The number of items for sale has reached a record high of 670,000 - half of eBay Australia and three times as many as Sensis’s tradingpost.
OZtion has over 3 years experience in the online auction business, the site was launched in early 2005 and has been developed and maintained in-house by an efficient team in Melbourne. Kelvin Yip, OZtion’s Chief Technical Officer commented “From day one, we took a different approach than many other auction and classified sites; we decided to build everything in-house instead of outsourcing or purchasing off-the-shelf products. This enabled us to constantly revise our platform and introduce new features and improve the user experience. Many of the changes we have made have been the result of member feedback. Rolling out new features, improving the system and system scalability planning can easily be carried out thanks to our early adoption of building everything in-house.”
www.oztion.com.au had 2 million visitors in May and according to Alexa an Amazon.com company that ranks Web traffic the site ranked at 10,954 today, slightly higher than tradingpost.com.au which is ranked at 11,701 today. Kelvin Yip commented “We have the infrastructure in place to support 5 times as many visitors and will keep upgrading the infrastructure ahead of demand. We learnt a hard lesson in 2006 when the site crawled to a halt due to a massive increase in users, at the time we only had 5 servers and the system could not cope.”
With over 670,000 items for sale from verified OZtion sellers, Australian shoppers clearly have a viable alternative place to shop online.
Background Information
OZtion commenced in 2005 when co-founders Philip Druce and Kelvin Yip decided to go head to head with eBay and provide Australians with an alternative auction site.
All research and development for the site is carried out in Melbourne.
All items listed for sale on OZtion are offered by sellers that have been security verified by OZtion’s verification process.
OZtion has grown rapidly by offering Australians a safe trading environment, a simple to use site and beneficial cost savings due to its fee structure and localised sellers.
Media Contact:
Philip Druce,
Email: www.oztion.com.au/
www.oztion.com.au
