About Trade Trucks

Trade Trucks

Overview

TradeTrucks (tradetrucks.com.au) is an Australian online marketplace and news service for the commercial vehicle industry, published from Melbourne by Prime Creative Media. It is the digital platform of Deals on Wheels, the long-running truck classifieds magazine, and it combines a searchable database of new and used trucks, trailers, buses and commercial vehicles with truck news, reviews and market data produced by the publisher's transport journalists.

The marketplace is the core of the service. Dealers and private sellers list vehicles by class — prime movers, tippers, trays, curtainsiders, rigid trucks, trailers and buses — with specifications including power, drive configuration, kilometres and stock numbers, and buyers can search by location across Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Adelaide and regional areas. Around the listings sits an editorial layer of industry news and expert reviews, which the site attributes to the team behind Deals on Wheels.

TradeTrucks is one of a family of classified platforms that Prime Creative Media operates for the transport, machinery and agriculture sectors, alongside Fullyloaded.com.au, OwnerDriver.com.au, BusNews.com.au, TradeEarthmovers.com.au, TradeFarmMachinery.com.au and TradePlantEquipment.com.au. Listings are syndicated across that network, so a truck advertised on one site can surface on the others.

History

TradeTrucks is the online descendant of Deals on Wheels, the classified magazine that became a fixture of Australian truck trading. Deals on Wheels marked the publication of its first issue in 1985 in its own retrospective coverage, and for decades it was the print marketplace in which dealers and operators advertised trucks through classified listings before online platforms took over that role.

The website itself was launched in 2013. Deals on Wheels reported in 2019 that TradeTrucks.com.au had averaged 36,898 visitors a month in the corresponding period of 2013, when it was first launched, and that by the first five months of 2019 that figure had grown to an average of 115,682 visitors a month, with direct traffic up 16.4 per cent year on year. In May 2019 the stock listed on the site reached what the magazine described as an all-time record of 25,960 vehicles, up from 17,428 a year earlier, and buyer enquiries hit their highest level in almost a year.

Through this period TradeTrucks belonged to the Trader group of transport and machinery titles. It was published under Bauer Trader Media, part of Bauer Media Australia, after Bauer's acquisition of ACP; Deals on Wheels' market reporting in 2019 described TradeTrucks as part of the Bauer Media Group transport classifieds network. In 2020 Mercury Capital purchased Bauer Media Australia and the business was rebranded as Are Media. In July 2021 Prime Creative Media acquired the Trader Group of brands from Are Media — 11 mastheads and digital platforms covering transport, civil construction and agriculture — and TradeTrucks has been published by Prime Creative Media since then.

Content and Coverage

The editorial content on TradeTrucks falls into three strands. The first is market intelligence: the site publishes regular analyses of new truck sales based on the Truck Industry Council's T-Mark data, breaking results down by heavy, medium and light duty segments and by brand. Its report on the third quarter of 2026, published on 15 October 2026, recorded 9,733 heavy-duty trucks sold in the first three quarters of the year and identified Kenworth, Volvo and Isuzu as the segment's leading brands — an example of the sales-data reporting the site carries throughout the year.

The second strand is reviews and road tests of new trucks, written by the Deals on Wheels editorial team. Recent examples include a review of Scania's 500 P Super published in January 2025 and coverage of working trucks such as the Kenworth 909, alongside buyer-oriented features on what operators look for in used equipment.

The third strand is the marketplace itself. Listings span new dealer stock — including current-model Fuso, Isuzu, Sitrak, FAW and Mercedes-Benz trucks — and used vehicles from private sellers and dealers nationally, from near-new curtainsiders to high-kilometre prime movers. Each listing carries photographs, pricing (or price on application), specifications and seller contact details, and premium listings are promoted across the site's homepage and article pages.

Audience and Reach

TradeTrucks addresses the Australian commercial vehicle market: truck dealers, fleet operators, owner-drivers and private buyers and sellers of trucks, trailers and buses. The most recent audience figures published for the platform are those reported by Deals on Wheels in 2019, when the site averaged 115,682 visitors a month over the first five months of that year and carried a record 25,960 listed vehicles in May 2019; those figures are the publisher's own, reported at the time, and no more recent audited audience figure for the site has been published.

The same 2019 reporting gives a sense of the scale of the wider network of which TradeTrucks is part: almost 6,000 used trucks were then advertised across the Bauer Media Group truck and machinery classifieds network, which the publisher said reached an average of almost 500,000 unique in-market buyers each month across Fullyloaded.com.au, OwnerDriver.com.au, TradeTrucks.com.au, TradeEarthmovers.com.au, TradeFarmMachinery.com and TradePlantEquipment.com.au. Kenworth was the most-searched make on that network in early 2019, accounting for almost 35 per cent of searches. These are historical, publisher-reported figures for the network as a whole rather than current figures for TradeTrucks alone.

Digital Presence

TradeTrucks operates entirely online at tradetrucks.com.au. The site is structured around its search marketplace, with category browsing for trucks, trailers, buses and commercial vehicles, spotlight and premium listings on the homepage, and location-based searching for buyers who want stock near them. News and review content is published on the site alongside the listings, and articles carry Prime Creative Media image credits, reflecting the shared editorial operation across the publisher's transport titles.

The platform's listings also appear across Prime Creative Media's sibling classified sites, and the site's market reports draw on the Truck Industry Council's T-Mark registration data, the industry's standard source of new truck sales figures. As at October 2026 the site was carrying current news — including its third-quarter 2026 sales analysis — and live listings for 2026-model vehicles, confirming it remains an active trading platform.

Ownership and Organisation

TradeTrucks is owned and published by Prime Creative Media, the independently owned, Australian B2B publisher headquartered at 379 Docklands Drive, Docklands, in Melbourne, Victoria. The company describes itself as Australia's largest independently owned business-to-business media organisation, and its chief executive is John Murphy.

The title reached Prime Creative Media through the July 2021 acquisition of the Trader Group portfolio from Are Media, in which 11 mastheads and digital platforms covering transport, civil construction and agriculture changed hands. Are Media's chief executive of automotive, Andrew Beecher, said at the time that the titles had found an ideal fit, and Murphy said keeping Australian-owned publications alive allowed investment in quality journalists covering industries critical to the economy. Before Are Media, the Trader titles had been published by Bauer Trader Media within Bauer Media Australia, and earlier by ACP.

Within Prime Creative Media, TradeTrucks sits in the transport portfolio alongside Prime Mover, Big Rigs, Owner Driver, Deals on Wheels, Trailer Magazine and the Fully Loaded news service. Editorial content for the site is produced by the publisher's transport journalists and the Deals on Wheels team, while the classifieds operation is run through the publisher's Melbourne office; listings themselves are placed by dealerships and private sellers across Australia.

Contact and Availability

TradeTrucks is available at tradetrucks.com.au, where buyers can search thousands of new and used trucks, trailers, buses and commercial vehicles, and sellers can list vehicles for sale to a national audience. The site can be browsed by vehicle category or by location, including Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney and Adelaide.

The publisher, Prime Creative Media, is based at 379 Docklands Drive, Docklands, Victoria 3008, and can be contacted on +61 3 9690 8766. Advertising and listing enquiries for the platform are handled through the website and the publisher's Melbourne office.