UK Marketplaces Rankings Tracker Year 2 – February 2021

We have been tracking UK marketplaces over a year now, comparing performance between the different venues you sell on. Today we start collecting data for the second year and are now able to directly compare performance with 12 months ago. We have kept the data from the past 12 months and for the UK Marketplaces Rankings Tracker Year 2 are adding second graphs to make direct comparison visually easy, as well as today publishing the first three months data for the second year. Read on to see which marketplace traffic is significantly up and where the growing opportunities for merchants are.

Data is taken from SimilarWeb and Alexa. Neither are 100% accurate but what they will reveal is a standardised measurement we can use to track increases or decreases in traffic overtime.

This series is sponsored by OnBuy.com, but their metrics have been measured in exactly the same way as the other marketplaces featured. Data for this post was gathered from SimilarWeb and Alexa on the 19th of February 2021.

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon’s trajectory continues to mirror the same period from 12 months’ ago with the exception that the entire graph has moved up the table – they are now tracking well over 100 million visits a month more than the same time last year.

What is interesting with Amazon is that their monthly unique visits are only up around 12 million. This means more people are buying on Amazon but everyone is buying significanly more frequently than at any time in the past.

eBay.co.uk

eBay’s traffic is up around 12 million unique monthly visitors than this time last year and their total traffic is up almost 80 million visits a month. This tracks with the number Murray Lambell revealed in a video published in January where he said eBay’s internal tracking (as opposed to our stats from SimilarWeb) shows unique visitors tracking at 29 million a month. That’s just about one out of every man woman and child in the country shopping on eBay at least once a month.

Gumtree.com

Gumtree are one of the few platforms in our tracker where visits are significantly down – It’s reasonable to expect people are doing fewer person to person transactions during the multiple lockdowns different areas of the country have experienced so this shouldn’t be a surprise. Traffic is only a couple of million down on this time last year and the graph is tracking roughly the same trajectory so we were expecting to see interest in Gumtree bottom out over the winter months.

Etsy.com

Etsy have almost doubled their monthly visitors compared to last year and added an amazing 80 million unique visitor per month. It’s fair to say that their 470.5 million visits a month is an all time high as Etsy rides high on the coat tails of the pandemic. Many turned to Etsy to buy fabric face coverings when the pandemic began and it appears that this influx of new buyers have stayed and hopefully have carried on buying.

notonthehighstreet.com

Notonthehighstreet are another marketplace to double their traffic over the winter compared to the same period last year. Topping out at over 15 million monthly visits, Notonthehighstreet regularly see massive traffic at Christmas but this year was a barnstormer beating last year which topped out around 8 million.

With Notonthehighstreet having been recently acquired by Great Hill Partners, we can see the attraction as business in the Richmond based marketplace is better than ever before.

OnBuy.com

What can we say about OnBuy that truly reflects their perfomance? In this tracker we’ve seen many marketplaces double their traffic compared to last year but OnBuy’s has grown by a multiple of 7. Yes, a year ago OnBuy were a promising marketplace with 2.6 million monthly visit and today the number has multiplyed by 7 to over 19 million monthly visits. Similarly, unique visitors to OnBuy have grown from 800k to over 6 million.

We’ve said it multiple times, but if you’ve not already selling on OnBuy then 2021 is the year you have to get live on the marketplace. OnBuy have all the integrations with the most popular multichannel management platforms you need to make selling easy and this year they are planning on going international which will boost traffic even further.

While you might have looked at OnBuy as a start up and one to watch, they are now too big and growing to fast for them not to be a default marketplace where you have to list.

Fruugo.co.uk

Fruugo saw a massive spike in traffic during the first lock downs but it calmed down over the summer months. Then this winter they were back with a vengeance doubling their monthly visits compared on the same time last year. Fruugo is the marketplace you want to list on if you wish to sell overseas without the complexities and they also attract customers from search engines so it’s likely you’ll win customers that don’t habitually shop on the marketplaces you already sell on.

Yumbles.com

Yumbles traffic has skyrocketed from around 400k visits a year ago to over 2m currently. It should be no surprise that with lockdown at Christmas that a food marketplace has prospered mightily. People have to eat no matter what outside factors there may be and with many attractive goodies suitable for gifting Yumbles is always busy at Christmas. If you’re selling food then Yumbles should be an automatic choice of where to sell.