Archive for the ‘Site changes’ Category
Gumtree Daily Deals
In case you haven’t seen it yet, we want to let all our blog readers that live in London and the South East know about our brand new Gumtree Daily Deals especially for London. We’ve launched the new service today and kicked off with an exclusive offer for a boat ride on the Thames. Make sure you sign up to receive our email alerts as we’ve lots of great deals in the pipeline for you.
Gumtree Daily Deals is our new UK-wide service that will let bargain-hunters sign up to receive unique nationwide and regional offers by email. We’ve already launched in Manchester, Edinburgh, Brighton and Belfast and will be coming to more towns and cities soon.
In an exciting twist on the traditional deals services, we’ll be calling on our community of users (that’s YOU!) to post suggestions for new deals on our Facebook page. Whether you’re an adrenaline junkie, keen to try sky diving, or just fancy an exclusive weekend treat – Gumtree Daily Deals could make it happen!
If you’d like Daily Deals to come to your city then let us know, and don’t forget to suggest the kinds of deals you’d like to see us offering!
Gumtree Ireland
For all you Irish Gummies, we’ll be launching a new Gumtree Ireland on Monday with an updated design and we’ve also been working to improve the search functionality. This does mean that you won’t be able to use Gumtree IE over the weekend, so please bear with us in the meantime.
We’ll keep you updated and let you know when the new site goes live – we hope you enjoy using it.
Thanks,
The Gumtree Team.
UK, you’re covered – introducing Counties
As part of our ongoing work to become truly local, we’d like to introduce you to a new way to search and post ads on Gumtree. From 23 Aug, not only can you browse by city, you can broaden your search and browse by county too. With all counties as locations, we’ve got the whole UK covered.
How to browse
It’s really easy to use. From the UK homepage you’ll see an expandable menu that allows you to browse any county. Just click on the area you’d like to search in, and we’ll show you results in cities and towns associated with it.
Posting an ad with Counties
Posting an ad in a county is just as simple. We’ve redesigned the ‘Post an ad’ page slightly to make it easier for you to select your location. Use the dropdowns to select your region and city or county.
Tip: If you’re on the border of two counties, pick the one that you live directly in.
Once posted, your ad will appear in results in the county it’s associated with. It’ll also show up in neighbouring towns and cities. This is to make your ad easier to find by people who are searching locally.
And that’s all locations in UK covered.
Property for Sale ads on Gumtree now powered by Zoopla
We’ve teamed up with Zoopla, the UK’s most comprehensive property website, to bring you Property for Sale ads offered by agents. This means if you’re a property agent, your ads will appear on both Gumtree and Zoopla at the same time – bringing you double the exposure at no extra cost or effort.
To get your ads to show on Gumtree and Zoopla, all you have to do is sign up as a member with Zoopla.
If you’re a private owner, you can still continue to post your Property for Sale ads on Gumtree as usual.
Join 13 million others on the new Gumtree
>> Switch to the new Gumtree now
Last year, we asked you to tell us what would improve your Gumtree experience. Thanks to your input, we received an overwhelming 8,000 pieces of feedback and suggestions. All these have helped us to build a new Gumtree to make it easier for you to place and search for ads.
Here’s what you can enjoy by switching over to the new Gumtree:
- Search across the UK – great for cars and jobs
- Search locally in your neighbourhood – useful for everyday stuff, flats and services
- Get to any of your desired locations more easily, including cities and their surrounding areas
- Find something simply by typing your town or postcode in the search bar
- Select the city you live in to be your default Gumtree homepage
- Get the same Gumtree experience across all web browsers – we’ve made some tweaks to the fonts and colours on the site
So, what does this really mean for you? If you’re looking for something on Gumtree from the homepage, you can now get to it in as little as 3 simple clicks:
1. Select your region
2. Use the search bar to enter details of what you’re looking for, where you’re looking and which category it belongs in.
3. Voila! You instantly get a list of results. Click on an ad that interests you to view it.
It’s that easy.
The new site’s been up and running for the last couple of months and we’ve already had 13 million people switch over, discover and enjoy everything the new Gumtree has to offer. In fact, people who have switched over to the new site have found a 15% increase in replies to their ads. Find out what you’ve been missing and join us today!
>> Switch to the new Gumtree now
Let’s not stop talking. Tell us what other improvements you’d like to see for the new Gumtree.
Update on payments
As part of our work to make Gumtree as quick and easy as possible for everyone to use, we’ve been making some changes to payment methods and just wanted to let you know about them.
Introducing mobile payments
We’ve added payment by mobile phone as a new payment method when you choose a paid-for option, such as Bump Up, for your ad.
It’s simple to pay by mobile phone. Just reply to the text message that confirms how much you’re paying, and the amount is added onto your monthly contract bill or taken from your pay-as-you-go credit balance.
For now, we’re testing this with payments for up to £3. Once we’re happy that it’s working well, we’ll look to raise the maximum amount. For larger amounts, you can use our other payment methods of debit/credit card or PayPal.
Rounding up amounts for payments
You might notice in your invoice that amounts are in whole numbers. Due to network restrictions, payments will be rounded up to the nearest number e.g. £2.95 will be rounded up to £3. This applies to all payment methods, whether you’re paying by debit/credit card, PayPal or mobile phone.
Happy birthday, Gumtree
Gumtree is 10 years old this year. It’s been a remarkable 10 years, and I want to thank you for your part in making Gumtree the growing success that it is.
In the last 10 years, we’ve grown to become the UK’s largest classified ads website. Last year, Gumtree became the site with the largest number of job and private car ads (nearly 10 times more than any other motors sites) in the UK. 13 million people use Gumtree every month, and I’m so proud to be part of something that plays such an important part in our lives.
For me, the core essence of Gumtree is that it connects people to find, buy and sell things they need everyday – we like to call it everyone’s local noticeboard. Like the other day, someone told me about how he’d sold his child’s old bike to a neighbour who lived 6 doors down. Previously, he’d never said hello to this neighbour, and now they regularly get together with their families. Stories like that just make it all so worth it.
Our 10th year is going to be exciting. As you might know, over the last few months, we’ve been seeking your feedback on a site redesign. We’ve had almost 5,000 comments from you so far, of which nearly half are being reflected in the changes to the work-in-progress site – from being able to search easily, whether it’s across cities in the country (particularly useful when searching for cars or jobs) or in your local area (for finding a flat or day-to-day stuff), to addressing spam issues in the Jobs category. While the new site will be ready soon, you can still opt in to test our sneak peek site and give us your thoughts.
Thank you once again for making Gumtree what it is today and here’s to the next 10 years!
Suchi
P.S. If you’ve got a great story to tell about something you’d bought, sold or found on Gumtree over the last 10 years, we’d love to hear it over email.
More great changes to the Gumtree preview site
We just wanted to let you know about more improvements to the preview of the new Gumtree site. If you’re not using the preview site yet, you can sneak preview here.
Easier to use and on the eye
We’ve tweaked the site design so it’s easier to read with a new font, and it’s easier to find your way around with the carefully chosen colour combinations and layout. The site’s fresh and contemporary, and still reassuringly Gumtree. What might seem like just a lick of paint at first glance actually makes Gumtree easier to use.
Do more, click less
Isn’t it great when you can do everything you need to in one place? We think so, so we’ve made it quicker and easier for you to get things done on a single page. Handy hints mean the help you need is right there and you can now view search results by price and by date added. Thanks to your feedback we have also improved the Spotlight Ads.
Location, location, location
Gumtree will be getting even more local in 2010, as we’ll be making it easier for you to find ads that have been posted near your part of town. First to benefit was London, with our previous sneak peek, and now Londoners can focus the search on different parts of London, such as South West London, as well as local neighbourhoods, such as Clapham. Next we’re going to get the neighbourhood searches right for the rest of the UK.
So whether you’re looking for something round the corner or happy to look further afield to find a bargain, Gumtree makes it easy to find what you need. Take your pick from nearly 2 million ads, or search in just one particular area – it’s your choice.
Thanks so much for taking the time to preview the new Gumtree site. Keep giving us your feedback. If you haven’t yet, now’s a great time to opt in, and head over to our forum to tell us what you think. We love hearing from you because your comments help us make Gumtree even better for everyone.
Top 5 improvements to the sneak peek site
A month ago, we introduced you to a sneak preview of the changes coming soon to Gumtree. We’re really glad so many of you took the time to tell us what you thought. We’ve taken your feedback, the good along with the bad (well, we didn’t think we’d get it right the first time round), and can now show you an updated version with the top 5 improvements you wanted for the new Gumtree:
- A truly local search in your area*
How you search and find what you want has remained a big focus for us. In December, we introduced the ability to search in your city and neighbouring cities (see the Before picture). Now, you can zoom in and search in your local area. E.g. Not only can you now search for a 1-bed flat in Islington, you’ll also be able to search in Angel. If there aren’t enough results in Angel, we’ll also show you 1-bed flats available in nearby areas like King’s Cross and Old Street.
- Search by postcode or area name
Currently, you have to select the city you want to search in using a drop-down menu (see the Before picture above). We’ve taken away the drop-down, and you can freely enter any area you like, whether it’s by postcode (full or partial) or your area name. This will bring you more focused results, and should save you time having to look through lots of irrelevant ads.
- See prices at a glance in results
You’ve told us you’d like to see prices of items or services without clicking on each individual ad. We’ve added a price column in the main results page, which means you can now scan through prices quickly.
- Faster page loading times
More pictures on the site means pages take a little longer to load. We don’t want your search on Gumtree to be slowed down by this, so we took a close look at our website code, and have improved page loading times.
- Improved category structure
Following your advice, we’ve adjusted our category structure to make it easier to find what you’re looking for when browsing the site E.g. Musical Instruments has been given its own sub-category directly under Stuff for Sale
* For now, this is only available in London. We’ll be introducing these changes to the rest of UK in our next update.
Along with these improvements, we’ve also fixed a number of kinks you found in the system, like problems using the site with Internet Explorer 6 or pictures not appearing in some Firefox browsers.
We think we’re moving in the right direction so far – the number of replies to ads posted on the sneak peek site has increased by 20%. We know there’s lots more work to be done. We’re still working on improving the look of the site after hearing your thoughts, and hope to show you new designs soon. And we’ll also be introducing all these exciting changes to Gumtree Ireland as well.
If you haven’t tried the new Gumtree site yet, now’s a great time to opt in. We’re still gathering comments and suggestions, so please head over to our forum to tell us what you think.
On the closure of Friends & Dating
Thank you for all your feedback on our decision to stop offering our services in the Friends & Dating section. We realise many of you are very disappointed and have been waiting to hear back from us. Now that we’ve gone through all your feedback, we’d like to take the time to address two specific questions you’ve been asking:
- Why did we close Friends & Dating?
- What are we planning to focus on for 2010?
Why did we close Friends & Dating?
In a survey we ran last year, along with a wishlist of improvements you told us you’d like for Gumtree, we also learnt that Friends & Dating users were the least satisfied of our Gumtree users. To enable us to focus on a few critical things, we made the tough decision to withdraw from Friends & Dating. As Suchi, our MD, told the BBC yesterday on Working Lunch, “I’d love to be everything to everybody but I just can’t. I had to draw a line and that’s where we drew it…we did a lot of soul-searching.”
Our team’s working hard to improve your overall experience on the site, and we hope you’ll appreciate what we’re doing and continue to use Gumtree to buy, sell and find your day-to-day stuff, cars, jobs, flats/homes, services etc.
What are we planning to focus on for 2010?
This year, we’re continuing to focus on making Gumtree easier and safer to use. Last December, we introduced two significant changes:
- A new beta site that enables you to search across cities, and in fact all of UK, for the first time
- A revamp of our forums to allow you to more easily start, participate in conversations and tell us your thoughts on Gumtree
Also, here’s some of what we’ve got in the pipeline:
- Search in your neighbourhood: Our current beta site allows you to search within your city and neighbouring cities, and we’re now working on enabling you to zoom in and find things in your immediate neighbourhood and other nearby local areas. Look out for an invite to take part in Beta 2 soon.
- Reduce fake ads and email spam: In the same survey we sent out last year, you mentioned your frustration with fake ads and email spam. Fake ads seem to be particularly rampant in Jobs, and contain links leading you to dodgy sites you don’t want to go to. It’s the same thing with some replies to ads. Without getting too boring and techie, we’ll be implementing a solution that will stop these auto-generated ads and fake replies from making it onto the site.
We want to do a lot more and do it well, and would be grateful for your patience and support on this journey. If you’d like to chat more, please join us on our forums.
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Latest tweet:
@AlanfromSpain I am glad to hear everything has been sorted now, all the best for the future Alan!
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Gumtree's lifestream
Yesterday
Hi @giuliettatragni why not paste a link to your Gumtree ad on our Twitter page! [uk_gumtree]February 9th
Hi @bexxx_lou Thanks for the suggestion. Feedback like this helps us immensely in improving our site. This something we will look into! [uk_gumtree]February 8th
6 days till Valentines day!* Not feeling romantic? Watch this and have a little laugh instead ;) http://t.co/LrTDXkdN [uk_gumtree]February 7th
Hi @GavinSteele26 Type in 'Apprenticeship' and it will bring back your local results. For example: http://t.co/tTPZLmP1 Good luck searching! [uk_gumtree]
Did you know that it’s National Apprenticeship Week? *We’ve got loads of apprenticeships listed on Gumtree - go have a look :) [uk_gumtree]Powered by Lifestream from iBegin.
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