Webupon

New Zealand seems to be a place where young internet entrepreneurs take a good idea and run with it, and suddenly find themselves taking on the big boys.

Trade Me
is the prime example. Begun by Sam Morgan only a few years ago, it’s now so popular in New Zealand that virtually everyone knows what Trade Me is, and use it in preference to
eBay.com
, the company that seemed to be the last word in online auctions.

Amazon
is also a household name (as an online bookseller, rather than a river) but even that name is gradually being challenged in New Zealand by a small online book, DVD and CD seller called Fishpond.

Fishpond
? What’s that got to do with books? Probably about as much as Amazon.

Where did it start?

Fishpond was begun just three years ago by a 22-year-old named Daniel Robertson. It started out in a spare bedroom in his house in Papakura, just south of Auckland. Now he has a staff of 18 people, and his business occupies premises conveniently close to the Auckland airport.

This isn’t the first NZ online bookstore. Flying Pig had a brief fling at the process, but fizzled out, and the big bookshop chain, Whitcoulls, also has an online presence that’s moving ahead after some false starts.

But Fishpond is making a real go of it.

Who’s behind it?

Daniel Robertson began his online presence with a niche market product. It was software built on the open source operating system Linux. But there weren’t a lot of people in the country wanting this product, so he used his Linux knowledge to build a retail system that handled supply from wholesaler to customer and back again. There have been three years of refinement and now the operation works very smoothly.

How it works

Fishpond isn’t a full-in-your-face site, like Amazon, and it lacks some of Amazon’s features. Being at the bottom of the world, it also lacks the enormous range of product. Nevertheless, it works well, and satisfies its many customers.

And in the last year or so, there has been a huge increase in the sale of secondhand books on the site. Sellers can work through Fishpond, advertising their goods for sale, and getting a reasonable profit from it. Reviewers are also able to gain points that can be used against sales.

The major bonus for New Zealand readers, is that the freight is local rather than international.