TradeSoft launch: the next evolution of Airsoft Trader

Welcome

Hey everyone, Dale here, the original founder and creator of Airsoft Trader, the platform I first released back in February 2016. It's hard to believe it's been more than 10 years since Airsoft Trader launched. It's been a long decade, and a lot has changed.

First, I want to say thank you to the community for supporting the platform and the service over all these years. I'm genuinely happy it's been received so well and that you're all still using it after all this time.

I've put this together as a video walkthrough rather than a written post because it's easier to actually show you what we've built, what's changed and what's coming, rather than just describing it. Here's what I cover:

• The rebuild and rebrand from Airsoft Trader to TradeSoft
• What's migrating across to the new platform
• How to get started
• What's coming next
• How to give feedback

Why we rebuilt: from Airsoft Trader to TradeSoft

When I first released Airsoft Trader, your feedback was invaluable in building the community and the platform we all needed at the time. It's served the community well ever since. But there's one thing I always wished I'd been able to do back in 2016: build a mobile app.

Most of us are on our phones all the time now. Back then, if you didn't have the skillset yourself, mobile development was significantly expensive, and for a hobby site with no profit in it that simply wasn't possible. Airsoft Trader was always there to help the community, not to make money.

The other issue was a fragmented user base. Trading was spread across forums with no central place where airsofters across New Zealand could come together and buy and sell with each other. That's the problem I originally wanted to solve, and it's the problem TradeSoft is built to solve properly.

Rebuilding under a new brand let us move away from decisions made 10 years ago that no longer made sense, and rethink how we want to do things going forward. That's a big part of why we've rebranded: to give you a much better service. And after 10 years, there's a lot of data to bring across too.

What TradeSoft is

The rebrand is called TradeSoft, the new marketplace for airsofters. We're focusing on the New Zealand market right now, with other countries potentially coming later.

TradeSoft is available as a mobile app for both Android and iOS, and there's a web app as well. If you're used to the Airsoft Trader website on your computer, you can keep doing that. And if you'd rather use it on your phone, that option is now available too.

What's migrating across (and what isn't)

After 10 years there's a lot of history in the old system: trading history, feedback, listings. There's a dedicated Airsoft Trader migration page on the website covering exactly what's being moved across. Here's the summary.

What we're bringing across

• Active listings. If you had an active listing on the site on 21 July 2026, it's been migrated. That was roughly 180 to 190 active listings at the time.
• The primary photo from each listing. If a listing had multiple photos, only the primary one has come across, but you can upload new photos to your listings in either the mobile app or the web app, and edit or update listings whenever you like.
• The trader behind each listing, meaning your user profiles.
• Feedback history. There were close to 2,000 pieces of feedback across the community over the last 10 years, and all of it has been retained in your profiles.

What we're not bringing across

• Existing passwords. You'll set a new one.
• The private message system. What we've built is completely new.
• Watch lists and saved listings.
• Sold, archived, pending or draft listings.
• The verification states we had on Airsoft Trader. There's a specific reason for this: more on our new verification approach below.

Getting access to your account

Getting into your account is straightforward: create an account using the same email address you used for Airsoft Trader, and things will sync up when you log in.

If you used social media to log in on Airsoft Trader, whether Facebook or Google, and that social login is tied to the same email address, your account details will sync up the same way.

Trust and safety: how we verify users

The biggest challenge for any online buy-and-sell community is the risk of scammers. It's unfortunate, but it's the reality: even massive platforms can't fully eliminate it. Rather than pretend we can, we've built several systems to help the community deal with it. This is also why we're handling verification differently than before.

Phone verification (optional)

You can verify your mobile number if you want to. Do so, and you'll get a phone verification badge on your profile showing you're a real user with a real mobile phone.

Email validation

All email addresses are validated, so you can't sign up without a valid email, unlike on the old Airsoft Trader.

Scam Scan

Scam Scan is our integration with Google. Every time an image is uploaded, whether as a listing photo or in private messages, it runs through a backend check to see if that image is used anywhere else online. If Google finds it elsewhere it gets flagged, and that flag is reported to both the person viewing and the listing owner.

The owner can appeal a flag, for example if it's a legitimate stock photo or they're also selling on another website, but as a buyer you'll still see the flag on the listing letting you know the image appears elsewhere online.

Club verification

This is the one I'm most excited about. If you're a member of an airsoft club in New Zealand, the club can verify you. Clubs get a dedicated area on the platform where they log in and confirm that a user is one of their members. You then get a club verification badge on your listings and profile. That way, anyone trading with you knows you're a real player in the community and part of a recognised club.

Getting started: downloading the app

iOS

The iOS app is available on the App Store. Go to the website and click the App Store download link, or search the App Store directly for TradeSoft (Airsoft Trade, New Zealand) and it'll come up. Download it to your phone and you're ready to create your account.

Android

Android is a little different: it goes through a two-week review process. Before an app can go onto the public Play Store, it needs a minimum number of users in internal testing first.

Since about 60% of our user base is on Android, here's how it works for now:

1. On the website, click Get on Google Play, which takes you to an opt-in form.
2. Fill out the form. We collect these details and, pretty much every day, upload them to our Google account to send out invites.
3. You'll receive an invite to download the app onto your phone.

Once we've had enough testers for a couple of weeks, we can apply to publish on the public Play Store for general downloads without this testing flow.

Setting up your account

Both ways of getting started need to sync your new login credentials with your existing account.

If you're on the mobile app (iPhone or Android) and you want to get started, go to sign in, or if you don't have an account yet, sign up to create one. Use the same email address you used for your Airsoft Trader account. We'll send you an email with a six-digit code to enter and verify your email address.

Once verified, you can complete your setup:

• Set a password
• Add a profile picture and display name (this is what's publicly visible)
• Set your home region (used for location features in the app)

Your email address isn't shown anywhere. The app doesn't use your exact location either, it attributes you to a nearby town or region, so listings can be shown to you more usefully without exposing where you actually are.

After that, you can optionally verify your phone number for the phone-verified badge on your profile and listings.

Using the app: the five core areas

Once you're in, there are five core areas along the bottom: Home, Browse, Sell, Messages and Profile.

Home

The homepage shows featured ads from around the platform. On the old Airsoft Trader, featured ads sat in the header with listings underneath. In the new app, the homepage keeps those featured ads front and centre.

Browse

Browse breaks things down into categories, with listings underneath. Go to Browse All and you can scroll through every listing. Tap a listing to open it.

You'll also see flagged images here in action. For example, a listing using an obvious stock image will show a caution note, "Photos found on other sites." Tap the prompt and it'll tell you where that image was found.

Listings

Listings are similar to Airsoft Trader: title, pricing, listing details and a questions and answers section, all public. There's also seller information, and you can message the seller if you're interested in buying.

Message the seller, and the improved feedback system

Tap Message Seller and it pre-populates a message you can send as-is, or write your own to start a conversation.

We've meaningfully improved the feedback system here. When a seller marks an item as sold, they choose who they sold it to, either someone who messaged them about that item, or "sold off-site". If they pick someone who messaged them, it ties the sale to the relationship between buyer and seller. So when feedback is left, it's actually tied to a real sale.

That's a big step up from Airsoft Trader, where you'd simply go to someone's profile and leave feedback with no actual trade behind it. Now you can see whether feedback is tied to a genuine transaction.

Sell

Creating a listing works much like Airsoft Trader: pick a category, fill out your details, add up to seven photos, review and publish.

Messages and Profile

There's a Messages area for all your conversations, and a Profile section where you can view your own public profile and edit your details.

Your profile area also includes:

• My Listings and Listings You've Purchased. When a seller marks you as the buyer of an item it shows up here, and you can leave feedback for that seller directly.
• Watch List
• Bump Credits, a new feature. As new listings come in, older ones get pushed down. Bumping a listing pushes it back to the top of the queue for more visibility.

Notifications and push notifications

There's a Notifications area for all in-app notifications: questions on your listings, club invitations and more.

We recommend enabling push notifications. With them on, we'll send alerts to your phone when things come through, such as a new message or a question on a listing, even if the app isn't open. That way you won't miss messages from buyers when you're trying to sell. You can granularly turn individual notification types on and off based on what you want to be alerted about. Push notifications work on both Android and iOS.

Blocking users

If you're being harassed by a particular user, you can block them. A couple of things to be aware of: blocking a scammer won't stop them leaving you negative feedback if they've scammed you, and we've thought carefully about preventing that kind of abuse. When you block someone they can no longer message you, but if you've had a trade with them, you can both still leave feedback for each other, and that feedback stays visible. That's important for keeping the feedback system honest.

Feature requests

We've added a feature request area where you can suggest features and vote on others' suggestions. This is one of the main ways we'll learn what the community actually wants as we finish building the platform out.

The web app and dashboard

The web app for TradeSoft mirrors the mobile app but currently has some extra features, because we can iterate faster on the web.

The mobile app does lag slightly behind the web app right now, so some of what follows is web-first for the moment and will make its way into mobile over time, including more search and filtering options. On the web app you can filter by price, distance from you and verified sellers, among others.

Listings on the web app work the same way. You'll see image flags, and clicking one shows details about where the image was found. Messaging is fully built into the web app too.

Web app login for Android users

If you're an Android user and you can't yet access the app, you can log in via the website. Use the forgot password routine to sync up your account:

1. Choose forgot password and enter your email address.
2. We'll send you the same six-digit code used during account creation.
3. Enter the code, set your password, then go to your profile to complete your details.

You won't go through the full onboarding flow this way, so you'll need to add your profile image, location and similar details manually in your profile. But it will get you into your account with a password.

Community area

The web app also has a community area (clubs and events) which the mobile app doesn't have yet. It's one of the things coming to mobile.

Draft and clone listings

The web app currently supports clone and draft listings, which the mobile app doesn't have yet. On the web you can create a listing, save it as a draft, and publish it when you're ready. In the mobile app a new listing goes live instantly, there's no draft option there yet.

Clubs and events

Part of the community focus is a dedicated events and clubs area.

Clubs get a management dashboard where club managers can manage members and club details, and there's a club profile page: header image, logo, club details, website, contact email and phone number, a member list, any listings tied to the club, any events, and an overall feedback rating based on the club's members.

The whole idea is to give the community a central place to see who's who: what clubs people belong to, whether they're trustworthy, and whether they're vouched for by others.

Events

Clubs also get an events area where they can create recurring or one-off events, manage them, and publish an event page. Events show up so you can find what's happening in your area from different clubs. You can filter by month or by region, so if you're heading to Gisborne next month, filter by Gisborne to see what's on.

We know a real pain point for clubs is having events scattered across Facebook, various forums and different websites, and filling out the same details everywhere is time-consuming. Unfortunately, integrating directly with Facebook isn't possible; they stopped that around 2018, and their API only lets you populate or pull events.

Our plan: events are created in TradeSoft, and we give you a widget you can embed on your own website to pull through your latest and upcoming club events. We'll also provide API access, so if you're more technical and run your own community or club system, you can embed events directly, for all clubs or specific ones.

Where clubs stand today

We currently have 25 clubs on the platform. We've reached out to all of them. Just for context: we've contacted everyone, but we're not forcing anything. Whether your club vouches for you as a user is entirely up to you and the community.

Some clubs have responded positively, none have responded negatively, and a number simply haven't responded yet. So if you're a member of a club, get onto them. We can get them set up, and they can then add and validate you as a member.

What's coming next

Airsoft Trader is winding down

We're going to leave Airsoft Trader up and running for a period of time, maybe a month, two, or three; I'm not sure yet. The site will stay open, but we've stopped new listings and relisting, so there'll be nothing new on Airsoft Trader. If you need to go back into it, to check old messages for example, you'll be able to for a while.

We have no immediate plans to close the old site, but we'll be setting up redirects and prompts (pop-ups and similar) letting people know we've moved and where to find the new platform. Just be aware: Airsoft Trader will no longer be used for new sales of airsoft gear.

The roadmap

We have a roadmap, and some of it has already been built:

• Sharing profiles and listings. These pages are public to a point: some information will require you to be logged in to view, and the same goes for club pages and events.
• Region. The mobile and web apps are currently restricted to New Zealand and Australia, so anyone outside those regions can't access them.
• The club directory and ratings are already live, and we'll keep adding more.
• The feature requests area is where you can contribute ideas. If a suggestion fits the goal of what we're building with TradeSoft, we'll certainly consider it.

Support and community

• Account issues: email us at [email protected], or browse the Help Centre.
• General feedback and discussion (things that don't count as feature requests): use our Reddit community, it's the easiest way. You'll find our social media links at the bottom of the dashboard.

One known issue

There's one mobile app issue I'm aware of and will be fixing. Because of how long app store reviews take, I didn't want to push a new build until this first one was approved, and there's a batch of new features coming in the next build.

The issue: if you leave the mobile app open in the background, say overnight, it won't reconnect to the system when you reopen it. Listings won't load and you won't be able to view your profile. The fix is simple: just close the app fully (swipe it away from the background) and reopen it, and everything works straight away.

Thank you

Hopefully this wasn't too long. I wanted to show you what we've got, what's coming and what's already available so you can get started.

We're hoping TradeSoft becomes the next evolution of Airsoft Trader, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few years with the community.

Thanks for your time, and have a great day.

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