OnBuy have reported a 1300% year-on-year growth (March 2018 to March 2019). OnBuy added that during the beginning of the April the marketplace’s transactions were up 112%, compared to the first week of March 2019. They also saw a 600% increase in users joining the platform this month.
Cas Paton, founder OnBuy puts down the growth of revenue to collaboration with PayPal. He says that the payments provider’s level of security and protection brought a piece of mind to sellers and buyers.
“We’ve experienced a fantastic week to kick-start April and put our booming sales and growth down to continue fostering innovation to enhance the customer experience. At the end of last year, we announced our partnership with global online payment specialists, PayPal, which has really helped fuel our exponential growth. The move to PayPal means that our buyers and sellers benefit from a robust level of security and protection. We will continue to disrupt the sector by investing millions into OnBuy and will shortly be launching new services to revolutionise online retail across the country, details of which are yet to be revealed. Equally, we attribute our exponential growth to the fact that our selling fees are cheaper than Amazon, meaning sellers can price competitively and stay profitable whilst buyers can get the best deal. We make the lives of our sellers as easy as possible by continuing to bring new integrations on board, such as ChannelAdvisor, Linnworks, Storefeeder, Royal Mail Click & Drop and plenty of others.”
– Cas Paton, entrepreneur and founder, OnBuy
OnBuy report about 8m customers and 12m products listed online over thousands of categories. The marketplace are aiming to expand to more than 140 countries by 2022. They also said they will be introducing new services for merchants in their ongoing push to “revolutionise online retail.”
11 Responses
It always concerns me that onbuy talk about massive percentage increases in sales and not hard numbers. a 1300% increase on a small number of sales is relatively easy, but you would not hear ebay or amazon achieving a 1300% because they are already achieving billions in sales and that type of increase is just not possible or at least very unlikely on a site achieving decent multi millions or multi billions in sales.
I am all for more competition to go up against the big two or three but i hate this fake news on how well they are doing in an attempt to drum up more sellers.
Give us some real numbers, is onbuy doing £1,000,000 sales per month? or £1,000,000 per year? give us something real, it is very easy to say you are 100% or 1000% up if your sales were tiny in the first place.
We are on onbuy and apart from one instance where they promoted on of our products we have seen almost no sales, 6 sales last month on low cost electronics which sell plenty elsewhere every day.
8m active customers? 8m have actually made a purchase? Or is that 8m visitors for the year? There is no real substance to these figures and i suspect that is on purpose because i feel our sales speak for themselves, the sales have increased, from about 1-2 sale per month to 4-6 approximately, but that is nothing to get excited about.
The other hate i have with these new marketplaces is they are all about price, price price, all they want sellers to do is offer a lower price than website X because their fees are lower, that is not really enough of a USP, we have both onbuy and now ebuygumm both begging sellers to give them the cheapest price.
I am all for alternatives but these do not seem to bring anything new to the table.
Prove your worth and disclose some real figures please, then perhaps sellers might get more excited about giving you some special deals to promote or give your website some more resources.
I’m in the same boat as Kieran. We had a couple of sales per month at the end of last year and then in the new year that went down to one. We packed in at the beginning of this month as the time needed on the site is to much for such a little return. They talk the talk but don’t give actual facts. All they are good at is trying to make it sound good. Sellers know of this company because of places like this which costs nothing to advertise there business which is all down to false figures. When was the last time you saw an advert of this company for buyers on either TV, Radio, Newspaper etc as I have never seen them and neither have buyers. They are living on subscriptions from sellers joining and the odd sale here and there but in the end it will go nowhere. What makes it worse is that you cannot upload listings from ebay so everything has to be done manually which any company looking at this that has a large inventory will walk the other way as it will be to much trouble.
So they went from 1 sale to 14 sales per year? thats 1300%. We invested some time in the marketplace and then decided to knock it on the head after no sales for months.
Again, be transparent with the figures, if you cannot be honest with businesses signed up then it really does not put much trust in the marketplace from the start.
I invested a lot of time in OnBuy and for 1 month we had great sales (September) but nothing since. When they first started we could offer `Deals` but as more sellers came on board this was no longer available.
Like Michael says above it is now time to knock it on the head and move on.
We are having a different experience on Onnbuy. We have only put on about 15% of our inventory so far, but sales are trickle through each week. To be fair our main season is June to August, but it is good to seem sales coming through already. We are about to upload another 50% or so of our listings now.
I think when there places are small it can be hard to get people to find them, but everyone started that way. You can’t expecta market place to just suddenly have hundreds of millions of buyers, so first sellers have to take the plunge. We decided to try it with only key lines to start with so as not to invest too much time but to give it a chance. We also added a note to every ebay order telling people we were now there and how to find it. Alreayd we have had several sales where the customer flags up on our database as an recent ebay customer. Everyone can help advertise! Natural curiousity always comes into play when a existing seller they buy from tells them of somewhere new.
So yes they play on figures… don’t we all? Our sales were up over 40% on ebay compared to March last year… but we make more money in 3 days during a heat wave in July than we do in all of March so it depends how you view it!
They are trying, so far all my questions etc have been answered swiftly and more importantly… actually answered rather than scripted replies that bare little resembleness to my question. Sales are small, but they are there and increasing. I’m happy to give them a little support, after all if we don’t, then we will forever be stuck with ebay and amazon and so the misery will continue.
omg… so many typos, edit button, we need an edit button!
OnBuy have attracted the attention of the Amazon drop-shippers.
I noticed my trademarked items on sale there at daft prices. To be fair OnBuy support binned them off quickly once I told them.
Not an inspiring sign though.