Thread: Second hand airsoft trading site

Second hand airsoft trading site

Over the past 5 and half weeks I have been working on a trading site for a niche in my country.
I launched it on the 24th February in its basic a primitive form of the basic classipress site but have worked on it and the promotion of it every week since then.

The site fills a gap in the niche here in NZ where 2nd hand trading is spread out over a large range of forums, an expensive auction site (like ebay) and used to be Facebook. However Facebook have shutdown at least 3 of the primary trading groups as dealing in airsoft guns is against their terms now.

Site had an initial large growth of users but now sitting at 300 registered members. Over 600 likes on Facebook - all legit & targeted airsoft players in NZ.
I have had in total just under 200 total ads submitted to the site. with about 30 marked as sold.

Long list of customisations to the site including;

• Social login
• Users added to MailChimp list when registered
• social sharing of ads
• Seperated out the tabbed box on the single listing page so user details right at the top
• Added feedback system
• Verified users + age field only admin can edit
• private messaging system + edited the listing contact form to send message via this system instead of direct email (note they still receive email, however need to login to account to read the message).
• added first and last name to registration form
• changed 'mark as sold' so it 'pauses' the add (removes it from the listing)
• auto posting to Facebook of new ads only.
• Added 'knowledge base' area using same style as Classipress ad listing
• Add a chatroom for logged in users
• Added related ads on each listing page
• Added watchlist system
• Edited the 'ribbons' plugin so I could have multiple tags before item titles depending on what category they are in. (WTB and Graveyard will show different icon before the title)
• added total number of running ads to the front page
• Plus loads more tweaks and working on the child theme

All listings are free. I will never charge for listing an item.
However I do plan to in the future once the site has more traction is to charge for 'featured ads' and premium listing options. But keep things cheap. Basic ads like they are now, will always be free.

Usage wise, I get about 1,200 page views a day. The best day I've had is nearly 3,000 page views (not used in the average as a one off).
Unique users are about 150 a day. The highest I've had is 453 unique users / visitors in one day.

Promotion of the site is done heavily through Facebook. I ran a couple of paid campaigns and spent about NZ$50 on running 3 different adverts for page likes and couple of boosted posts. Page likes were about NZ$0.19 per like, so pretty cheap. I do get organic likes daily as well, however the paid likes really boost the profile of the page and site. Targeting 18-55 males in NZ with interests in Paintball / airsoft and several of the top manufacturers in their interest. This means only people that are interested in this niche will see my ads and I'm not wasting my money showing it to people who have no interest in signing up or using the site.

I also made some patches up for players uniforms and ran a promotion using a booted post, where I gave away 10 patches to any one who liked the post. I also got quite a few likes on the page from that, and the patches were not that expensive (bought from China).

If you want to take a look at the site, head over to www.airsofttrader.co.nz if you have any questions or feedback don't hesitate to ask.

You did an amazing job man! Good for you. I think the timing of Facebook shutting down those groups is really going to help you a lot. There is forum software for wordpress and that might be a good idea to install that so people have a place to converse since the whole facebook shutdown.

Thanks,

I've just added more functionality with a cool member search that pulls information including their verified and age status along with their feedback score - looks pretty cool

Yeah I installed bbPress but I don't want to manage a forum, nor compete with the forums that are already out there. The chat room gets little use - so I probably won't keep this.

Interesting thing about a forum though is it can improve your SEO and drive more traffic to your site. You can always have volunteers manager the forums like Reddit does. No need to do it all on your own. Either way, great job!

I have also added Vantage to a subdomain to the site and built it out to match the look of the main site.
I bought the FlatPage and FlatPress child themes as they both looked the same to begin with and made customising the child themes to match much easier than trying to get the default vantage theme to match my classipress child theme.

The directory example can be viewed from the main site or by going to http://directory.airsofttrader.co.nz

Nice site

You can try change... to have picture for mobile phone, change in you style css row 3533 from none to false, and row 2910 from 100% to 140px, it working for my site it is same theme as you have,...

I don`t now why they try to hide picture??

Ah I forgot to enable images for the mobile! Thanks.
I had done this with the original child theme I made but when I moved to FlatPress I forgot.

Ill update that shortly, thanks for pointing it

you've created a very, very neat and nice site. all the best! .. and lots of patience

best wishes,
H

Thanks, Helmuc.

I've actually been working on a new theme for the site the last couple of months. With big improvements for mobile users.

The key things in my new child theme is stripping out all the unnessecary information Classipress gives for each ad listing preview, cut down to image, title, price and location.
Ad previews are in grid format, minimum of 2 wide up to 4 wide based on screen width.

ad listing pages has a tab system for Ad details, messaging user, and comments - making it quicker and easier to access to mobile users (no need to scroll down down down until you get to the right parts).

Improved the dashboard areas so they don't have a sidebar (again focusing on mobile users) each account screen has a submenu at the top, and then an account summary, followed by that pages content.

Nice visibile 'new message' notification top of the browser on desktop and mobile when they have a new message.

Feature ads (so I can start charging) and more more than just adsense.

User profile / edit profile screens updated and improved to contain more information. also built the feedback system into the pages again using tabs on user profile so they can quickly leave feedback / view feedback or message user.

Filtering so users can filter ads by region, and sort by price.

and lots more.

Note that some screenshots from the desktop don't have 'sidebars' thats because in some areas ive not populated the widgets yet as i've been working on the 'core' content.

Rolled out my update this weekend for the site.
Almost a complete redesign, but overall big changes to the ad listing layout, the ad previews, added sorting / filtering and more.