It’s always good to see a new player on the UK online marketplace scene and the latest new site to catch our eye is buuy.co.uk. Last week I was able to catch up with Buuy co-founder Justin Hodnett to talk about how it’s all going.
Their pitch is a simple one: “Buuy.co.uk, is a simple and easy to use marketplace that allows you to list and sell any item for FREE! It is Free to Join, Free to List and Free to Sell on Buuy.co.uk – NO COMMISSION! Whether its old, new, secondhand or handmade – we want it all on Buuy.co.uk! Help make Buuy the #UK’s No 1 marketplace!”
Justin is passionate that the marketplace is always free and is enthusiastic that they can, in due course, take on the bigger players. Their focus is universally on the UK right now and the big drive is to spread the word and bring in the buyers and sellers. They’ve bankrolled the site by themselves so far.
As a quick look around the site will show, they really are in the early days. There isn’t a whole lot for sale yet but Justin from Buuy tells me that they’re working on that and hopefully soon they won’t be counting inventory in the thousands but the millions by the end of the year. They’re keen to hear from any sellers who wants to get involved.
One current initiative underway for them at the moment is making inventory upload a whole lot quicker and easier with the aim being a seamless upload for your eBay inventory coming in the pipeline.
It’s an interesting concept and the free aspect will appeal to many but the real challenge will be buyer awareness. Every marketplace is defined by whether it’s popular with buyers and that’s where eBay and Amazon have the edge: they can spend millions on marketing and get that all-important traffic.
But there’s definitely plenty of space for new players and we’ll keep you posted on how Buuy does. Will you be getting involved and selling on Buuy?
6 Responses
A better option than onbuy now they have finished their bait and switch with offering a free listing option and going back to a month subscription.
I came on here to see if anybody had any success with Onbuy since they’re changing their pricing model again. I was debating paying, assuming people had more success then I had, but maybe I’ll try this one instead.
It’s insanely arduous to make listings manually on onbuy anyway, I had just 3 listings up for a couple months because I have dozens that all the same with minor size and colour mix differences, and I just need to ‘sell similar’ but there’s no option for that, so it was taking me like 10 minutes of copy/paste to get things up. So I just gave up really. It doesn’t seem very well populated at all anyway.
This site looks more user friendly, I do hope they do well. They’ve certainly got the right structure to attract sellers from the get go!
I spent 3 days writing a custom perl script to export my 8,000 products to their feed format. They didn’t even add them to their site, now I know why. What a waste of time when I could of been doing something else on my business.
All these types of sites need an easy and free import from eBay option. Then I’ll use them.
Thank you for your comments about Buuy.co.uk.