Because a few people have asked – and more importantly, because some of their customers have read stories and are panicking – we asked eBay shop designers Frooition just exactly what’s going on there. Are they going bust?
No, said their CEO Phillip Molloy. There’s been a management buyout of the old company by Phillip and their previous MD, Grenville Whelan. The old company was closed down by an administrator, which is how you close companies, and that’s why people are seeing notices of that company being “in administration”.
The reason for the buyout is about control: Phillip says that they wanted the freedom to invest and develop the business and the old share structure didn’t allow them to do that.
There is no suggestion that the business is anything other than profitable and doing well; any debt or liability held by the old company has been taken over by the new company, which is looking forward to expanding into the USA this year. In addition, existing customers should find the platform more stable as they’ve now moved to Amazon’s web hosting (AWS) to speed things up.
Here’s Frooition’s press release on the same subject. I hope that sets people’s minds at rest.
Disclosure: Frooition used to advertise with TameBay. They no longer do so.
14 Responses
What that means in English is “company was struggling so went into administration and the previous management bought it off the administrators on the cheap.” aka a “pre packaged deal”, not good.
Agree completely with Steve. If you want to buy a company you don’t need it to go into administration. What a pile of bollocks. If you’re with them I’d suggest getting a plan B in place asap.
I am confuzzled, a client of mine was contacted by Frooition ltd’s administrators to recover debt, but you say any debt and liability has been taken over by froo.com ltd? Speaking to a contact at froo they confirmed it needed to be sorted out with the administrator and not froo.com ltd? I’m afraid I might need someone to break this down for me!
Is that the same Phillip Molloy who called it an ugrade when the frooition shop design went from a customization of the whole eBay shop to just one page?
From the Frooition that caused existing customers to right off what they had invested in a store design unless they paid an additional fee for the “upgrade” 😆
For me, as an early adopter of Frooition (back when it was Creativebay) I found the product quite reasonable. I paid a one off fee of £700(ish) and didn’t have any recurring “hosting” fees as we served our own Retrowarez to host the images etc.
Personally I think it went downhill when it became Frooition, and they started “tinkering.” However, in their defence, I suspect that as it was it wasn’t cost effective and they had to do something to bring in more money.
I realise with hindsight that we could have likely created a similar style ourselves, after all it’s only glorified css, and if I was to have an eBay shop again that’s the path I would take.
eSellerPro seem to have done the shop design for some of the eBay outlets, not Frooition. Not sure if there really is the same demand for a customised shop landing page anymore.
We left Frooition 10 months ago because the NSE upgrade was of very poor quality / reliability and they started having regular server downtime issues. At the same time they began charging £199 per hour for support. I can’t imagine any of these issues were good for business.
We doubled our ebay sales when we left Frooition and had our template redesigned by AsWas, and we were able to use the images for our website – couldn’t be happier with AsWas design, professionalism and aftersales service. We’re very small, but the AswAs fee paid back in 6 weeks!