Sellers who sign up to sell on OnBuy will be able to trade on the site until February without paying the £22 OnBuy monthly subscription. However if you think you might try OnBuy then sign up before the 1st of November to get an additional three months of trading absolutely free – meaning you won’t pay any monthly fees until June.
We recently wrote about OnBuy, so we won’t rehash all the details. We’ve still got no information on their launch plans, no idea quite how many sellers have signed up to the site with how many products to flesh out the inventory on the site. Offering lower monthly fees and sales commissions than Amazon doesn’t matter much unless the same levels of sales can be delivered.
So OnBuy is pretty much an unknown and until their public launch on the 1st November no one can really assess them. However on a purely commercial basis it’ll only take you a couple of moments to sign up to OnBuy and list some products. Do so in the next 48 hours and you can trade for free until June. Sign up after the launch and you’ll start paying the subscription fee from February. Bit of a no brainer as you can always cancel if you’re not getting sales.
4 Responses
As an experiment I went onto Onbuy and tried a very general search for various products. The search was for such as Computers and Books and for almost everything that I tried it could not find anything listed. Where it did find anything its search was even worse than ebay’s as what it found had no resemblance at all to what I was looking for.
I have often said that I would really like a serious competitor to ebay. But I just cannot see Onbuy as currently constituted being it.
Hi Chris T,
Thank you for your comments. OnBuy has just launched onto the main server architecture that will see OnBuy through the next 12 months. This was a significant mile stone in our development, as we have now “Soft Launched”, on 1st November 2013.
Now that we are online in a more permanent environment, we can start integrating vendors. You can see here that we currently (at the time of me writing this) have only 3873 integrated products on OnBuy. This is a ridiculously small number of products compared to what we want on-board before we launch to the public.
We, today, have instructed our content team to start integrating the first 2Million products, which are products belonging to an array of sellers that have already signed up with OnBuy and been offered an integration slot. These sellers consist of many major online brands, house-hold names, limited businesses, and sole traders.
We will soon be announcing our future marketing, development and launch dates for all to see, and this should help clear the confusion of what to expect from OnBuy, and when. OnBuy, as yet, has done no public marketing and we are solely focussed on integrating sellers and preparing for our marketing launch.
We are fully aware and committed to the marketing exposure necessary to launch a marketplace, and OnBuy has employed a number of marketing programmes at significant cost, to enable OnBuy to be publicly seen by the masses. With considerable investment from Centerprise International, OnBuy is well-funded, well structured, and committed to achieving a significant and positive public response.
Once we launch our latest press, we will post a link on Tamebay which will hopefully clear up much of the confusion.
Thank You,
The OnBuy Team
Hi Chris,
You can browse here: https://www.onbuy.co.uk/browse.html to see the number of products that are listed in each category, that we mentioned in our previous post.
These numbers will start to increase, noticeably so over the next few months, once everyone already subscribing with us is completely integrated and new sellers begin to join OnBuy.
Thank You,
The OnBuy Team
Ok so I am a potential seller and I keep being badgered to sign up and start paying my £22. Now the fees are so and so but its the 15th Nov and I look at the site and the items just arent there and most of them have 0 stock – so why would I want to start giving my money to you when no one can buy anything and as you have quite rightly said you have done no public marketing. sitting on the sidelines until this takes off. As of today total items – 10.8k