The ecommerce company Buuy has relaunched in recent days as a local marketplace app which aims to take on the likes of Shpock and Gunmtree. The app is now live and the company is based in Preston, Lancashire.
They say that with the growing need for people to sell unwanted items locally without paying the fees for delivery, and having to wait, that this course was an obvious choice. They reckon that having a UK company taking on Shpock (Austrian) and Gumtree (owned by eBay) is important to people using the app.
Saying of the new approach and the development process on Buuy:
We looked at apps like Gumtree and Shpock, looked at reviews on their app store listings and saw what their users we’re most likely to give a bad review on and we saw a pattern, those problems became our top priority for Buuy then we worked on the rest. So, we are hoping that we have created an ideal fun and secure app for selling locally. We also do not expect listings to be added in under 30 seconds, we want the seller to provide as many details as possible to secure a successful sale of their item.
– Justin Hodnett, CEO & Founder, Buuy
This is a new incarnation of Buuy which was previously a marketplace that Tamebay wrote about here. The nascent Buuy.co.uk marketplace closed its doors after a wobbly few months of trying to fund its survival. The new app, which was expected to launch in the summer, is currently only available on the Google Play store for the UK Android market, with the iOS (Apple) version following soon behind with a launch date pencilled in for January or February 2019.
As always, Tamebay welcomes new entrants and competition to the ecommerce marketplace and it will be interesting to see how this new player performs in the months to come.
3 Responses
Seeing Buuy relaunched again just puts me straight off from even downloading there new app. How many times can they try, unless they really invest a few million on the development and advertising via social media, radio or TV then it will not work. There last site was great and worked but did not advertise it. You can have an app but unless people start talking about it on a major scale then I believe it will not work sadly. I’ve not seen any launch advertising anywhere at all. Why??
Good luck of course but not for me.
interesting view: the world is full of successful relaunches serving and providing wider choice to customers. I very much look forward to experiencing the improvements and in supporting entrepreneurs who provide local choice and competition.
needless to say, the more we experience and comment, the greater user marketing is achieved.
good luck
New players in ecommerce need to wise up and realise that offering “no fee” selling shreds their credibility.
Buuy never had a sustainable strategy before and its failure was no great surprise.
Have they learned anything second time around?
Onbuy have similar problems. Chopping and changing fee strategies and making bold claims that never quite materialise has undermined their credibility.
The problem for challengers to Amazon and Ebay is that it is a catch 22 situation.
You need to breakthrough quickly to make any sort of dent in the market, but it’s virtually impossible to do that, unless you have the resources of an Amazon or Ebay..
Sellers want competition to keep a lid on fees and bully-boy policies from the big two, but is a fragmented market really of benefit to either buyers or sellers?
Sellers would have to list on several different platforms, using wobbly api setups. trying to keep track of everything. Whilst buyers would have to make more than two clicks to buy things, which is their attention span limit.
Does anyone really win?