Launched in November 2016, OnBuy.com has quickly become the fastest-growing marketplace in the world by creating a fair, transparent and ethical marketplace that benefits buyers and sellers. Here, RLI spends some time with Founder and CEO Cas Paton to discuss the origins of the company, what makes it stand out and what the next steps are.
Having worked in e-commerce since the age of 21, OnBuy.com Founder and CEO Cas Paton noticed a gap in the market, which was the increasing need for a professional online marketplace that provided a level playing field for all its sellers.
The company was created to be a partner to retailers that sell on the platform, not to be a competitor, whilst at the same time offering customers a better shopping experience.
Today they have upwards of 35 million products on offer from reputable sellers, with just less than six million monthly website visitors. From household names to independent sellers, customers can shop securely for products from a range of categories, such as electricals, beauty, home and garden, toys and baby supplies.
“We’ve recently reported a record-breaking start to 2021, where we saw 800 per cent year-on-year growth in January, beating last year’s January sales in the first three days of the year,” explains Paton.
“After a landmark year in 2020, with 605 per cent year-to-date growth and sales soaring from a run rate of £24 million to over £200 million, we are quickly gaining market share.”
OnBuy enables international selling. They’ve embarked on an aggressive international expansion plan, which will see them reach over 140 new territories – including the US, Germany, France, Spain, and the UAE – by the end of 2023.
Even with the difficult market conditions currently, the company has not had to adjust their objectives for the coming 12 months too much. They have always strived to offer sellers a viable, dependable route to market and provide customers with more choice and convenience, which has become all the more important over the past year as people have been unable to visit brick-and-mortar stores.
“With the closing of non-essential retail for so much of the year, we were absolutely determined to ensure we truly supported our retailer base and protect as many small businesses as possible. Our sellers deserved the best possible chance to success during lockdown, with many of them turning to OnBuy when other marketplaces restricted their ability to sell non-essential products,” Paton says.
Looking ahead to the next 12 to 18 months, the plan is to double their sales by June, putting them on track to achieve over £1bn in gross merchandise volume (GMV) by 2023. They will soon be opening their Series B funding round and looking to secure backers that want to be a part of OnBuy’s ground-breaking journey to change the way the world looks at e-commerce. Also this year, the OnBuy Fulfilment Network will launch with many of the world’s biggest logistics companies, which will help sellers optimise their delivery and fulfilment operations to provide an even better service for customers.
The business is also in the process of completing their OnBuy app for both iOS and Android and it is due to launch this year. “We wanted to make the OnBuy experience even more accessible and seamless for our customers, so we are creating an app to do just that. Customers will be able to shop over 35 million products anytime, anywhere in the world. The app will be globally accessible, providing the same location-tailored shopping experience as the website,” explains Paton.
The company is active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, using each of the platforms to emphasise their personality and brand values of fairness, transparency and ethics, helping to drive traffic to the site and help bolster their brand identity.
By sharing exciting, engaging content and campaigns, such as competitions that require sharing and tagging to enter, they have reached brand new audiences and spread awareness of the brand more than they ever have before.
“Our mission is to revolutionise the e-commerce sector by providing a marketplace that benefits both sellers and customers. We have taken a different approach to existing marketplaces and our ethos is proving overwhelmingly successful. OnBuy is designed to work for sellers, not against them, so we will never compete with them. Instead, we help sellers to grow their sales. This ethos is at the core of everything we do and every decision we make,” Paton comments.
“We are a resilient and adaptable business, and when we are live in over 140 countries, we will be the world’s first truly global marketplace with the widest reach of any online marketplace – and as we are a true marketplace and not a retailer, all of our success and growth is shared by the independent businesses that sell with us,” he concludes.
