PayPal are officially promoting the OnBuy Marketplace as a PayPal negotiated offer. PayPal negotiated offers are designed to help save your business money and reach new customers.
This is a real coup for the OnBuy marketplace as it elevates them to the level of the two major UK marketplaces in the eyes of consumers and potential sellers on OnBuy – it gives a stamp of PayPal approval validating the work that they have done over the past few years to launch and grow their marketplace.
The PayPal offer is to “Reach new shoppers with OnBuy marketplace. Sign up now and receive 12 months free subscription. Offer expires December 31, 2018.”
Other promotions alongside OnBuy are Globe Packaging selling PayPal branded packaging (don’t buy from their website – it’s cheaper to buy from Globe Packaging on eBay) and Huboo multi-channel fulfilment.
OnBuy claim to have grown grown 1178% year on year now boasting over over 8 million items listed and saw 800% growth this summer alone. Checking Alexa rankings show that in the last quarter OnBuy’s traffic has skyrocketed which, at this time of year, should have translated into sales for their merchants.
8 Million items does still leave the OnBuy marketplace relatively small in comparison to eBay with over a billion listings and Amazon with around half a billion listings. It’s a nascent marketplace with significantly less traffic than the big two but, for many sellers, that shouldn’t put you off selling. There are millions of long tail listings on eBay that never get a sale and significantly more competition than on the OnBuy marketplace. If you’re looking to diversify and want to try a new growing marketplace then OnBuy is worth considering. If they can build on 2018 and continue to grow traffic through 2019 then by next Christmas there is the potential for them to deliver a bump in your marketplace sales that’s significant.
25 Responses
Will the 12 months free subscription offer from last year be extended ?
I like OnBuy, and have been working to optimise our lstings to gain more sales from it (it’s not doing badly), but I twitch when I see offers that benefit new customers and leave old ones carrying the cost. Hopefully I won’t see a reason to close the current account then sign up for a brand new one a few minutes later just to avoid being left out of this very generous offer !
Thanks for the quick response !
I like that – most of what we sell is low-value, high volume, and it seems we’re generally just around the £500 a month mark (but working hard to increase it), so having a safety net at that level works well for us. We’re protected if we have a poor month for any reason, and when we go over the threshold, we know the margin we’ve made will cover the fees.
I have been considering joining for the past couple of months, but this time of year is so busy I simply have no time to open a new account and start listing, can this not be offered until the end of January when it’s quieter and Christmas is out the way?
Still no proper categorisation for collectables, e.g., nothing for postcards. Never mind subcategories by country or type, there isn’t even a category for them!
We have inventory of 100,000 items but they’re clearly not interested.
Have mentioned this to them in the past, but nothing has changed.
Collectables makes up 13% of UK Ebay’s turnover. Plenty of sellers in those cats would love to jump over. But you’ve got to have proper categorisation.
People try to sell collectables on Amazon UK as well, but can’t get anywhere because they don’t have the categories either. Yet Amazon.com does!
Bizarre.
the really good news is that ebay will be looking over their shoulder
Questions for OnBuy.
If people join in January, will the 12 months fee free offer and the £500 safety net still apply?
I sell fishing tackle on eBay but can see your fishing category is populated with ladies’ flouncy hats, socks etc. This is really putting me off investing the time needed to transfer my listings over to you, as it looks a shambles in that category, if I’m honest.
Any plans to sort this out soon?
I looked at onbuy a while ago as an alternative to ebay due to the ever changing hurdles on ebay. I might re-address it and have another fresh look, I currently feel that I have all my eggs in one basket with ebay. If i remember correctly there wasn’t a suitable category for me to list in (commercial spare parts), it seemed to be more aimed at general consumer goods rather than B2B sales. I will have a look and see if the category choices have improved. I also think they had a strict no watermark policy meaning I would have to re-touch the pics for over 10’000 items we currently have on ebay.
Hi we have been on the site for a while now (since the start) and the hardest thing we find is customers complain about finding items as the categories are poor (hopefully not much longer) and a listing issue we have is You need barcodes so un barcoded items are not able to be listed.
I would join any site to try and move from eBay
Seems you have a problem with Drop Shippers on OnBuy. I just had a quick look and found one called SwiftDeals that just copies Amazon listings. I bet they hold no stock, just buy from Amazon when they get an order.
We joined OnBuy last month as this is a quiet time for us and so ideal to put in the effort to get stuff on and running. I must say that customer service when i have had a question etc has been 1st class. Fast and accurate to my request! Yes there are the usual copy and paste sellers and those that must just import all their listings and never check they are showing correctly, but atleats when we have encountered this and it has affected us, the c.s team have been quick to step in and sort it for us.
I have no idea how we will do over the next 12 months, but i am happy that the cs team will do all they can to help…. unlike ebay who seem to be doing all they can to hinder.
For the say of around £20 for the year, I think it would be a poor show on my behalf not to put the effort back into a company who are trying so hard, (esp when i bitch so much about ebay and wishing there was an alternative).
To those that won’t be ready to join until Jan…. for the sake of loosing one free month, I would join now and just think of it as 10 months free rather than 11…. but that is still alot of relatively risk free opportunity!
We have been on Onbuy for the last 3 months. I agree as a seller it is very good. The biggest but most important problem is they (Onbuy) are more concerned in getting more and more sellers and not concentrating on getting buyers. It’s a lot of effort to put on your listings to only get a few sales a month (that’s right a few sales a month). We get more sales in a day from either ebay or amazon than what we get from Onbuy in a month