TradeMe, as of 2007 the largest Internet-auction website operating in New Zealand, has as its management arm the company Trade Me Ltd. New Zealand entrepreneur Sam Morgan founded the site in 1999, and after some years of overall dramatic growth sold it to Fairfax in 2006 for NZ$700 million. Trade Me Ltd also operates several sister websites including Find Someone, Old Friends, Travelbug, Safe Trader and smaps.

Trade Me Ltd has become New Zealand's largest company of its type , and its flagship (blank">http://trademe.co.nz) became the most popular website in the country in _2005. The group of sites collectively generate just over 50% of all web-page traffic originating from New Zealand-based servers. In a country with a population around 4,177,000, the TradeMe site currently has 1,578,717 active members blank">TradeMe Statistics , with approximately 60,000 people online and 1,030,000 auctions running during peak hours.http://www.trademe.co.nz/

Participating traders can use New Zealand's banking system to settle payments. Many traders settle by bank-transfer, pago or by bank-deposit, and Australian sellers must have a New Zealand bank-account. Many buyers pay cash on pickup with larger items — probably partially due to the relative concentration of the New Zealand population in a relatively small number of urban areas. TradeMe transactions do not require _PayPal, as Australian buyers can pay with cheques, which many New Zealand banks will negotiate free-of-charge.

TradeMe shares many features with other online auction-websites, such as the American auction-site eBay. Some of these features include "Buy Now", "Auto bidding" and the Safe Trader escrow service. Members in New Zealand can become "Address Verified" by confirming their street-address, and sellers may choose to block unverified members from bidding. Significantly, despite its global reach, eBay has failed to make a sizable penetration in the geographically isolated New Zealand market.