If you’re not yet selling on OnBuy, it’s time to start taking the marketplace as a serious proposition and an alternative which should be on your radar. They are celebrating incredible OnBuy Black Friday results after a decision was taken to reduce prices on each of the 17 million products available on the site.
OnBuy, who aim to be the online marketplace sector disruptor and competitor to Amazon, saw huge sales across every department but particularly in tech, landing a transaction every 10 seconds. With over £1M in sales made on Black Friday alone, the trading results for November came in five times stronger than the same period last year.
“Black Friday was a real success for us and our sellers, with unprecedented figures. Last week’s sales were up 900% on the same week last year while November’s sales were up five times overall, and we know it was because of our bold positioning on Black Friday. We took a 5% hit on our sales fees across all products which gave our sellers the financial freedom to add further discounts and offer our buyers the best possible deals. We made a sale every 10 seconds on average in the 24-hour sale period and at peak times it was almost a sale every second!”
– Cas Paton, founder and MD, OnBuy
OnBuy, one of the fastest-growing online marketplaces in the world, offered more than £25M in the OnBuy Black Friday sale. Specialising in market-leading cosmetics, electricals, fashion and furniture, OnBuy stands apart in the competitive ecommerce sector by not owning or selling its own stock, but instead focusing solely on connecting buyers with thousands of professional business sellers.
“We saw more than £1M in sales in a single day, confirming a real growth and increased trust in our company. We pride ourselves in not competing with our sellers like brands such as Amazon do, and our Black Friday positioning really showcased this commitment and certainly paid off for the sellers and the buyers too. The numbers may be smaller than, say, Amazon’s sales figures for that day, but unlike other marketplaces we can proudly say that all these sales are for our sellers – not us.”
– Cas Paton
27 Responses
Serious proposition?!
We applied to open an account with them late 2018, when this was a required thing – not sure how it’s now. We completed the form and indicated our turnover(it was required field) at that point was 150k p.a. Nobody ever got back to us, neither we had an account opened for us.
Congratulations Onbuy.
All the listings I have looked at are delivery to “Mainland UK”.
Do Onbuy not want buyers from Northern Ireland?
What about Northern Ireland sellers?
North Crystal…. cut them some slack… Have you never had a form that didn’t go through or any kind of IT issue? Sometimes this stuff happens to businesses. My best bit of advice is that if you are serious about something and for what ever reason you don’t get a reply… send them a message to ask why? Of course you could just give up at the first jump and deny yourself a chance at a new revenue stream.
P.S sometimes the first you know a form etc isn’t working correctly is when someone messages you to let you know. If we all just sit back and curse instead then no one knows and nothing happens. Running a business myself i think that people letting you know when something is wrong is just as important as being told when something is right!
Congratulations Onbuy.
your one of the best marketplace in “Mainland UK”.
Onbuy gives very tough competition to amazon in UK
@ OnBuy Why do you continue to allow the sellers like Swift Deals to rip off your customers by reselling (arbitrage) products from Amazon @150% plus?
Of course buyers do get great “Amazon” service!
How can you be competing against Amazon if all you do is resell products from Amazon sellers? Even eBay started to knock this type of activity on the head as it is not in the best interest of customers. Even the customers start to ask “Why Pay More?” Just go to Amazon direct, rather than be ripped off on OnBuy.
Why is the “Compare Sellers” so far down the page? It is like you are trying to hide them, is that so everybody joins your partner plan? I guess that is a good reason, what happens when everybody signs up to the partner program, a bit like “Speedy Boarding”?
I know, you have that covered, welcome to Boost, just pay more….
What happened to the crowd funding? I got a few emails with all the hype and one stated “We’re opening our Crowdcube page up to you on the 21st of November, so you get exclusive early access ahead of the public launch. We’ll email you with a link to our private page on the day.” It is now the 5th December without a word or explanation of why it never happened.
Will you be launching a plugin for Woocommerce? to sync stock and import sales?
When it comes to OnBUy I hear a lot from them and Tamebay, but what I would like to here from any actual sellers who have had any success on that platform.
I remember an article been written how well Gameseek marketplace was going and then 2 weeks later it was bust…
I spent £50 a month with OnBuy for 6 month when they started out and got sweet hew haw in return not one single sale.
serious for who? a sale every 10 seconds? sorry but that is tiny. even this PR copy paste can’t differentiate them from ebay, which has thousands of times the traffic volume and search presence.
let alone Amazon. sure, OnBuy don’t sell anything so they’re not in competition with you, but what good is that if the best they can drum up is 1m GMV on the biggest shopping day of the year? if you have 1000 sellers on there that’s £1,000 per seller on average.
genuinely slightly surprised they thought this was worth bragging about.
@ Sam
We’ve been selling on OnBuy for well over a year now.
As Chris says, they are still a start up platform. They don’t have all the tools Amazon and eBay offer sellers, but on the other hand, the tools they do have actually work (unlike so many things on the “big two” which are either un-intuitive or just don’t work very well), and they regularly add to them.
Personally, I think they are wise to market in the way they do; they control their marketing spend carefully so they aren’t just blowing through cash and then hitting a wall, and while they aren’t going to be doing the kind of expensive TV advertising eBay and Amazon do any time soon, the marketing they do carry out is well targeted and cost-effective.
In terms of how we are doing on it, it doesn’t generate the volume of sales we see on the other two channels, but it’s certainly enough to make it worth selling there. It helps that it’s a lot less hassle in terms of both the quality of buyers and not having to worry about pointless policies (or the worry on Amazon of waking up one day to find your account has been suspended for some arcane reason outside your control), and their Support is definitely superior.
All in all, I see it as a place which is going to be a slow-burn build, but they seem to be really sensible in the way they are doing things, which bodes well for the future.
I sell in collectables and have been banging on about proper categorisation within Onbuy, but to no avail.
I can only presume they have no real interest in that area, as the categories are not fit for purpose. Take postcards, for example, there isn’t even a separate category for them, let alone types or countries. Open goal for taking sellers from Ebay who are still the only viable marketplace for collectables.
Hey Onbuy, congrats on your £1m day, but collectables make up 13% of Ebay’s market. You could be making £1m every minute if you would only see it. Seriously, you Onbuy guys, take five and have a look at how much sells on Ebay in collectables. Sellers there are peeeeeed off with Ebay but have nowhere else to go except independent websites.
@Andy-well said!
Collectibles, antiques and art are ripe for the picking, many eBay sellers completely fed up with no support, high fees and postage gouging, never mind the promoted listings fiasco and a search engine that doesn’t, ,,, well,,,,, search.
Even given the difficulties there’s still nowhere else viable to sell apart from eBay at present, so they can do as they please and treat sellers like dirt. And they know it.
@tyler Thank you for your reply.
We feel that we’ve been very open with you and provided plenty of information.
We’re a start-up marketplace and we’re not going to remove sellers from the site that are actively expanding our product range. However, we are going to continuously market for more sellers as well as continue to grow. We envisage that, as proven recently, less and less of the lead listings on OnBuy will be from sellers who price non-competitively. Over time, we see these sellers being less of a concern, and the short-term pain is actually resulting in us being able to market to better sellers to beat these prices.
Luckily, we market OnBuy predominantly on a product level (very granular) which means we’re not aggressive with marketing products of high comparative pricing. This means that high prices don’t produce substantial sales, whereas reasonable and competitive pricing does. Yes, these sellers make sales, but they are disproportionate to sellers that have competitive pricing and we’re able to drive significant volume.
Once we feel that we have enough products to market at a much broader level, we will invest in marketing again to drive even more customers.
We hope this has helped clarify the situation. This will be our final comment on this situation as we feel this has been adequately explained. We welcome sellers to join and offer more competitive prices to obtain a much higher level of sales for these items.
Best regards,
The OnBuy Team.
@tyler Thank you for your continued comment, however your conclusions are incorrect.
We have proven to date that we do care about our buyers – we will continue to welcome sellers to join our rapidly growing marketplace to offer stronger prices for buyers.
Hopefully in a short period we can offer even better prices and the issues you‘re concerned with will resolve themselves.
Thank you.
Best regards,
The OnBuy Team