Some news caught my eye today that PoundSeller has now added Ebuyer products to increase the choice of electronics and computer goods. You probably haven’t heard of PoundSeller, it’s a small start up marketplace which charges a single £1 to list an item with zero final value fees.
It’s a small site and to be honest I’ve been reticent in writing about them as I didn’t see the value compared with established marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. I don’t know their sales figures and don’t even know how they compare with eBid, but what I can do is compare their inventory levels with Rakuten.co.uk.
Rakuten has now been established for four months and had the big advantage of a rumoured £20 million launch budget along with established buyers and sellers to migrate from Play.com. On the face of it they should be wiping the floor with PoundSeller, so let’s look at the numbers:
Rakuten vs Play.com vs PoundSeller.co.uk Inventory |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Rakuten October 2014 |
Rakuten February 2015 |
Play.com October 2014 |
PoundSeller February 2015 |
| Laptops | 27 | 55 | 17,397 | 4,418 |
| Pets – Cats | 456 | 497 | 1,607 | 7,200 |
| Women – Footware | 3 | 148 | 13,394 | 28,136 |
| Home & Garden – Cookware | 463 | 651 | 14,251 | 346 |
| Baby – Pushchairs & Accessories (NB No actual pushchairs listed) |
30 | 162 | 1,264 | 0 |
It’s pretty obvious to me, that even with the integration of Linnworks (which means any Linnworks retailer could list all their product on Rakuten.co.uk at the click of a button), sellers simply aren’t embracing Rakuten. Rakuten’s inventory growth over the past four months is close to zero. That means that whilst Rakuten might be able to drive traffic from Play.com, when buyers arrive on the site there’s nothing there for them to purchase in most categories.
PoundSeller might be small, but as a buyer would you prefer to arrive on a site with a range of stock to purchase, or a site that looks like a ghost town with the tumbleweed drifting past?
Currently we couldn’t recommend that you invest in listing on PoundSeller, we’ve no visibility of their sales and their traffic rank doesn’t in our opinion justify the time and monetary investment. What is sad is that it’s even harder to recommend Rakuten as a place to buy from and we’re still waiting for merchants to adopt the marketplace and get their stock listed. Even one reasonable sized seller in each category would boost the available inventory massively and if you get in early there’s an opportunity to dominate your chosen category.
If you have listed on Rakuten what are your sales like? And if you haven’t signed up yet what are you waiting for and what would convince you that it’s a site worth investing in?
Finally… does anyone list on PoundSeller.co.uk? If so we’d love to hear how sales on the site are doing. If you would like to try out PoundSeller they’ve given a promo code for Tamebay readers – TAMEBAYPROMO for 50 free listings.
8 Responses
The reason Rakuten haven’t increased their stock is they are not talking to sellers, I was an original, original Play.com seller and have heard ZERO. In one of the categories above for Rakuten adding my inventory alone would more than double their SKU’s.
If they are quiet that must mean there is an issue somewhere….
I had a quick look at pound seller.
The information is not very detailed, mainly because i am comparing to Ebay and Amazon but on the face of it it appears that for low value items this is a no go.
It does not make it clear if they are charging £1.00 per sale or £1.00 for a 30 day listing, also can that listing sell more than one item in that 30 days, or is the quantity of every listing just one unit.
If they charge £1.00 for a single product to be sold then realistically you would not be able to sell anything below £10.00, at a £1.00 charge you are paying a 10% commission of course and on top of that you need to use paypal or google wallet to collect payment which also has a cost like ebay.
If i were to sell a £5.00 item then the commission percentage is 20% plus paypal costs.
I am confused about £0.99p items being on the site if they are charged £1.00 to sell them?
Maybe a bargain for anyone selling items above £10.00 but unless they clarify this marketplace does not look like it will work for lower value items, that in some ways conflicts with the site name “poundseller” although i understand from the information the name must refer to how much it costs to sell, but that message might be confusing to the consumer who might expect the site to be a pound shop.
Not convinced about this new site, and i feel there are so many more established ones at home and abroad which i am betting many companies have not yet embraced fully.
As for Rakuten, perhaps this is due to the poor way they have dealt with play.com and the poor quality of the play.com marketplace before hand, it was never that easy to get stock onto the play.com marketplace, i do not know about Rakuten, but i guess that many sellers are not yet prepared to make the time investment in this marketplace when they could be working on one of the international Amazon sites or another which might give more immediate returns on investment.
I emailed Rakuten to ask about selling on their site but they are not taking on any new sellers yet.
At the moment they are concentrating on moving over Play sellers.
They will be sending out emails to everyone else once this has been done, SO am not holding my breath!
My email from them
“Hello,
I am sorry to hear that you have been waiting so long for a response. We currently have a large backlog of potential merchants to work through and we will try and come back with a response as soon as possible.
Since we are currently trying to migrate old Play.com merchants as well as building our new Rakuten.co.uk platform from the ground up this is taking some time
We appreciate your patience and we will be in contact shortly.
Kind Regards
Paul Albury
Rakuten seem too expensive. £30pm subscription fee for the basic service.
The management haven’t thought this out- for an empty site with few buyers and angry neglected play.com sellers they can’t get away with those charges.
£30pm isn’t much money but if they expect serious sellers to be their guinea pigs at a cost they really don’t get it.
I think if you look into this website a little closer you will find most listings are affiliate link to major retailers!
I just chose 20 items at random in random categories and all 20 took me to major retailers websites via affiliate links so I don’t think there is much on there from real online retailers?
…… And add me to the list of Play sellers who have heard Zilch despite chasing them 2 or 3 times.
We were building up sales nicely on play. Com but their transition of existing Sellers had been an example in total incompetence!
Their director of communications interview with tame bay a few weeks ago was as far from reality as it is possible to get.
Come on Dan/Chris get him back to answer these issues honestly otherwise Play will close and getting us sellers back will be an uphill struggle for them