In our UK Marketplaces Rankings Tracker Year 2 published earlier today, we revealed that OnBuy have grown visits to their marketplace by an incredible 501% (according to SimilarWeb) in the past 12 months. In this OnBuy Special Report we can also reveal that the marketplace had an all-time record-breaking week with nearly 1.5 million users browsing the site, resulting in nearly £2.75 million in sales between the 1st and 8th of November 2020.
As the UK entered the second nationwide lockdown, OnBuy saw a dramatic rise in users as shoppers scrambled to prepare for a month at home with no physical access to non-essential retail. Compared to the same period last year, OnBuy tell us that their internal data reveals that users on the site increased by over 600% and sales revenue increased by an outstanding 837%.
“1st-8th of November was a major record-breaking week for OnBuy and we aren’t seeing any signs of this incredible growth slowing.
Given that stores will still be shut over this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, I am expecting that this year will be immense for online retailers and that a lot of small businesses will now be scrambling to get their products online before this all-important weekend.”
– Cas Paton, founder and CEO, OnBuy
OnBuy Special Report – Selling on OnBuy
Sellers are starting to notice OnBuy are going places – Not only did they see a huge uplift in sales in the first week of November, but they also onboarded a record number of 500 retailers in the past month, resulting in a 10% increase to our seller base. If you’re not already selling on OnBuy then now is the time to jump onboard, iron out any teething problems you may encounter and establish yourself ahead of their upcoming TV ads and launch into 42 countries next month as part of their plan to become a truly global marketplace, operating in over 140 countries by 2023.
“Over the past 14 years of editing Tamebay, I have seen many hopeful start up marketplaces – where they have inevitably faltered hasn’t been enthusiasm from sellers but a simple lack of buyers. OnBuy are the only one to buck that trend and move from a hopeful start up to an established and credible marketplace.
12 months ago with a touch under 700,000 monthly visits you might have been excused for a lack of interest. A year later and according to SimilarWeb they boast an amazing 3.512M monthly vists – yes they’ve added almost 3 million monthly visits in 12 months and that’s a 501% increase in traffic in just one year!
No other marketplace has seen this level of growth and OnBuy are poised to go international which should see their growth explode even higher. If you’ve dismissed them thus far, it really is time to seriously consider them again.”
– Tamebay UK Marketplaces Rankings Tracker Report
OnBuy Manchester expansion plans
Having been based in Poole on the South Coast, OnBuy are now in talks to secure office space in Manchester, the tech capital of the UK. This is part of a £10m investment into their expansion and will create at least 100 jobs in the area over the next two years.
“I was raised and educated in Trafford before joining the Royal Navy, later launching several businesses in the South of England. With OnBuy in the process of a worldwide scale-up, we’re poised for another year of immense growth in 2021.
I see Manchester as the UK’s second city in terms of size, but the number one city in terms of opportunity. That’s why I have dedicated £10m to open OnBuy offices in Manchester and grow our team here over the next two years. We’ll be looking for talented website developers, database administrators, marketing roles and many more skilled people to join us as we take OnBuy to the global stage.
We’re only a week off launching our first national TV campaign with ITV and we’re breaking sales records week on week. It’s clear that OnBuy is making monumental strides and I’m looking forward to bringing more Mancunians along on the journey with us.”
– Cas Paton, founder and CEO of OnBuy
The OnBuy Manchester office is set to open in March 2021 with job roles being advertised in the spring.
10 Responses
We are having big problems integrating OnBuy with Channel Advisor.
We only managed to list 6 items so far, there appears to be a problem with Category names. I am sure it will be a very good platform for us if the issue can be sorted
Anybody else with the same problem?
We could not link it with Opencart.
Had problems with condition if someone had already listed the product as say NEW it would not let us total pain and an expensive one at that.
We used the company CED Commerce that built the extension and they ended up destroying our site we just gave up with the while carnival (support zero)…
We are now using shopwired and have just gone with eBay integrating ( 5 mins to set up) till I can build a new open-source option…
We don’t sell on marketplaces but best of luck to OnBuy, great to see a British company doing so well.
I think it’s fair to say that OnBuy at just 4 years old might not have all the extensive bells and whistles of third party integration support that 25 year old eBay or Amazon have, but from their stats the indications are that it’s worth persevering. If you can crack the integration challenge their growth trajectory is looking worth the effort.
If it’s hard for you it’s equally hard for your competitors so 1st mover advantage is there for the taking.
Chris
The 6 items we listed on OnBuy gave us 2 sales after a week or so, that is a great strike rate, now we would like to convert that to 1000+ listings this Christmas if possible.
We have done what we can it’s down to OnBuy and Channel Advisor to sort out the issues
Just looked up a few of the products/brands I sell, then checked out the seller.
Sellers return address
Return address Customer Returns, Amazon Way, Dunfermline, Fife, KY118ST, United Kingdom, GB
Another one
Contact Us First, Contact Us First, Contact Us First, Contact Us First, Contact Us First
We want to be different from Amazon, yet the site is littered with Amazon sellers.
Hi Mick,
Thank you for your comment. We’re sorry to hear you’re having trouble with the ChannelAdvisor integration. We’ve recently made a large number of changes to our categories which will result in category errors, which then need to be updated in our ChannelAdvisor template. We’re pleased to inform you that we’re working to update our ChannelAdvisor category template so that all categories are supported. Once we have updated the file, this will be done in a way which will prevent these issues from occurring if categories need to be updated.
We understand that category mapping can be quite time consuming, so if you would like our help then our product team can do this for you. Please submit a support ticket through your Seller Control Panel and our team will be happy to help.
Hi Sam,
Thank you for your comment. We’re sorry to hear you’ve been unable to use the Opencart integration. As we’ve mentioned in previous comments, we don’t build the integrations ourselves but a range of companies do offer integrations into OnBuy, and if you haven’t already, we encourage you to share this feedback with the provider as well.
We would love to welcome you to OnBuy – you can see our other integrations here: https://www.onbuy.com/gb/partners/
I have commented previously but will add my experience again.
We thought we would give Onbuy a go as the Prestashop – OnBuy module was FREE.
It didn’t take long to list around 5000 products, and when I say not long, I think it was a few hours. That was me playing with the settings and getting things set up.
I had an issue a few weeks back, where an address was incorrect.
Contacted OnBuy and they reached out to CED who make the module for Onbuy. They contacted me quickly. After an hour or so of them looking in my back office and FTP access, they fixed the issue and all was good.
We get a few sales a day, so far, and with more buyers and sellers getting on board, I hope that will increase. So far it has cost me nothing to integrate with OnBuy and I can’t complain at that. No listing fees. Final Value fee is good too.
Hi
There is no point in us submitting a support ticket, we have been trying to get things moving with OnBuy since the beginning of October
I think we will leave it for now to allow you and Channel Advisor to agree on Categories.
At this time of year we need to be dedicating our time to creating and uploading our merchandise to other Channels
Please let us know when its sorted