Whilst many (and they have our deepest sympathies) businesses have struggled during the pandemic, Optiseller are one which has blossomed. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to force all businesses to focus on online sales rocketing demand for their services has seen Optiseller increase their headcount and now announce they are to build an eBay fast-track tool for onboarding retailers onto the marketplace.
Optiseller has grown it’s headcount by 20 since the beginning of the year, taking the total number of employees to over 50, with ongoing recruitment efforts to fill another 20 job openings. Their latest hire is a new Chief Operating Officer (COO), Richard Falconer a search engine optimisation specialist, to oversee further growth and expansion.
Optiseller also recently won an Innovate UK grant to develop a new automated platform which will see an eBay fast-track tool for onboarding retailers being built. The aim of the new eBay fast-track tool is to completely automate the process of onboarding a retailer onto eBay, reducing the time it takes from 10-12 weeks to just 4 weeks, and also slashing the costs from £15,000 to approximately £5,000.
If you’re like me your first thought is ‘bloody hell, £15,000 to get up and running on eBay!’, And yes for those of us that built an eBay business organically from the ground up it’s a ridiculous amount of money. However for those retailers who are bogged down with legacy systems it can easily cost that amount to build connectors for stock management and to extract orders from eBay, get their warehouse to ship them and do all the accounting bits and bobs essential to keeping a business legal.
It’s also very easy to list on eBay but, as any time served eBay seller knows, complex, frustrating and a drain on time to get products listed well and performing in eBay search. If you’re listing a few dozens of products then yes it can be done by hand but if you’ve got tens of thousands to list then you’re going to need some really beefy tools to start automating the processes.
With the Coronavirus set to stay with us over the winter months, there will be even more businesses who need the life line of being able to launch on marketplaces so the quicker this tool is launched and available the better.
“Many retail businesses have suffered great losses during the COVID-19 lockdown, where non-essential physical stores have been forced to close for months on end.
This new platform will transform a typically challenging, time consuming and expensive task for businesses, not only providing a short-term fix but also helping them to build a solid foundation to multi-channel retail as the country recovers.
Our solution not only mitigates against the temporary closure of the high street, but also helps companies grow revenues when demand has returned.”
– Richard Falconer, COO, Optiseller
As a side note, Optiseller already has a strategic agreement in place with eBay, which has just been extended, to offer its Aspect Finder+ tool free of charge to users around the world until the 31st of December 2020.
