Got my Deals Direct newsletter this morning. Saw an interesting banner ads at the top of the page, clicked on it, and it brought me to The Trove which has just been launched! What is it?

The Trove is a great place to sell items for free, because we’ve got the muscle of DealsDirect.com.au behind us. Through DealsDirect’s website and newsletter, we’ll be advertising to hundreds of thousands of customers looking for hot deals!

Basically it’s a free classifieds site. It does not cost you anything to put ads on their site so potential sellers can search through and buy directly from you. Well, it’s nothing new, and Australia already has heaps of other free classified sites (oh, and many more). Sometimes I do wonder how business like TradingPost is going to survive in the next 2-3 years when there are so many free alternatives out there.

What is distinctive about “The Trove” is, (1) free tagging (2) traffic drove from Deals Direct. Tagging (or folksonomy) is usually useful when you have a large amount of samples, and collaborative effort makes much better categorising. It’s everywhere now, but I think people generally need a bit of training with it.

Traffic coming from Deals Direct is certainly a very useful thing if you are thinking of selling. People visit Deals Direct in their “buying mood”, so the chances that they will be willing to spend are high. Also DD is probably one of the bigger shopping site in Australia at the moment, which will probably bring quite a few eyeballs over your items.

Well. Good luck to guys at Deals Direct as it seems to be a tough battle out there. However, since they are all free, I don’t see a reason why you can’t post your vintage item on them all.