OnBuy is set to go global this summer, after securing a £5 million investment. OnBuy’s founder and CEO, Cas Paton, is now projecting the business to be turning over £2 billion in sales by 2024.
OnBuy have ambitious aims and so far they’ve exceeded all expectations. Over the past decades there have been many aspiring start up marketplaces but most fail to achieve scale and become truly viable propositions but so far OnBuy have bucked the trend and their growth has been phenomenal in the face of giants such as eBay and Amazon.
Since launching in November 2016, OnBuy has amassed over eight million customers and more than 25 million products, with monthly visitors now trending at over four million along with over 400 retailers joining every month.
Following a 1100% sales increase in the past year, and now closing this £5 million Series A funding round, OnBuy has an aggressive international expansion plan to go global and launch into 140 new territories – including the US, Germany, France, Spain and the UAE. To accommodate this rapid growth, OnBuy has tripled its workforce to over 50 full-time staff.
“The injection of this additional funding not only allows us to substantially grow the operational side of the business, but it gives the OnBuy team backing from phenomenal investors who can bring an array of eCommerce experience and expertise to the table, bolstering an already strong globalisation strategy.
2020 is a coming-of-age era for OnBuy, where we’ve seen some of the world’s largest brands and retailers come on board. By having products from the leading household names available, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Kimberly-Clark, we are driving better competition which feeds into better pricing for consumers across a huge variety of products.
We are well on track to claim 3-5% of the £84bn UK eCommerce market in the next three years, and we’re aiming for 1% of the $3.46 trillion global eCommerce market, equating to $35bn, in the next five years.
We’re gearing up for an enormous expansion into over 140 new countries, which will allow OnBuy to become the first global marketplace and further set ourselves apart from the competition.”
– Cas Paton, founder and CEO, OnBuy
The Series A funding was raised from leading London-based VC firm Fuel Ventures and other experienced investors including Nathalie Gaveau, the co-founder of Priceminister, a premium French marketplace later acquired by Rakuten.
“In recent years the VC world has largely turned its back on marketplaces. They are notoriously hard to build and even harder to grow, given that the market is dominated by some of the largest companies in the world. However, it’s clear from seeing OnBuy’s unique model, their achievements to date and the impressive year-on-year growth that they have found the right formula for long-term success.
The decision to invest in OnBuy was an easy one for Fuel Ventures: it is now on the verge of becoming a serious global player, with some of the largest retailers and brands in the industry flooding to join the world’s fastest-growing marketplace.”
– Mark Pearson, Fuel Ventures
3 Responses
We use the FREE Prestashop module to connect to OnBuy.
We now have around 7000 items on there.
It was an experiment really to see IF it worked and hopefully be successful.
We have been on there around a month and sales started within a few days.
Our prices on OnBuy are slightly less than ebay to hopefully attract some customers and it’s been OK so far. Nothing compared to ebay and amazon stores, but still very early days.
The best thing is NO anchor store subscription to pay or listing fees.
As a small business, the store fee is a lot of money for us.
On OnBuy it’s £19 per month for the standard scheme but until you sell £500 PM or more it’s waived.
So hopefully onward and upward for OnBuy and take on the big boys/girls/ (enter your gender or lack of it here)
I am trying to connect my Opencart site to it but the extension is too old for my site. So emailed them asking to see if they have a newer one.
I like the idea of being able to work it from the website and manage the stock as am spread too thin over to many markets.
I know another seller on OnBuy and he is getting bits and pieces and say they are spreading his stock all over the web.
The FEES with new ebay Managed payments are much and much now as we go down with fees on eBay.
Bit like when they said they were going to conquer the UK by spending £3m on advertising, we listed on there and had nothing but file sync / selling issues and slow sales.
One for the future, maybe.