Who knew there was an alternative to Amazon? OnBuy.com is a direct substitute to the juggernaut that is Amazon, offering low fees for sellers meaning great savings for customers. According to the latest figures by internet analysts Alexa and Similar Web, the online marketplace, OnBuy.com, is officially the largest UK-owned marketplace. The shopping site has ambitions to achieve £400 million in annual sales by 2021, 5 per cent of Amazon's UK market share.

Cas Paton

We spoke to Cas Paton, entrepreneur and founder of OnBuy.com to find out more about the recent news that OnBuy.com is number one in UK traffic rankings for UK-owned marketplaces, outranking competitors Fruugo and Flubit.

Cas started the coding of the current OnBuy.com in 2014 as a self-funded venture and it launched in November 2016. The online retail marketplace has gone from strength to strength, now operating as the UK’s alternative to Amazon and offering a variety of products from reputable sellers across thousands of categories. Last year, Cas doubled the staff team and now runs a twenty-six strong team of customer support, seller support, product managers, content managers, website developers, website designers, operations, sales and management.

Cas told the Good Web Guide, ‘The biggest challenge to date has been increasing in products in our infancy. Sellers wanted to know that OnBuy.com had buyers, but buyers need products, and so we needed sellers before we had buyers. It’s a ‘chicken and egg’ situation that still continues. We now have ten million products live, but that’s only 10 per cent of our five-year target. Integrations such as Linnworks, ChannelAdvisor and StoreFeeder are making the uptake of products faster by making things even easier for our sellers. By continuing to focus on the seller, we are getting the products that we need to drive buyers - more sellers means more competition, more choice and even more deals that we are able to secure on the platform. All of this ensures a better shopping experience with OnBuy.com.’

OnBuy Marketplace

The business journey hasn’t come easy. As a young business person, Cas acknowledges he was quick to make decisions. ‘I am who I am because I was born with a deep-down belief that I can achieve. I have been entrepreneurial since I was a child, selling things since age five,’ says Cas. ‘I spent my time as a young child making things to sell, buying and selling, and when computers came along (I was approximately eleven), I was immediately inspired by the potential of the digital world. I was working on Sage Accounts by the age of thirteen, growing a local supermarket’s net margin from 20 per cent to 30 per cent through introducing barcoding systems. By the age of fourteen, I was building websites.

I’m not a coder, but my journey from being a child to an experienced businessperson has taken me through many challenges, experiences and opportunities within the world of web. OnBuy.com is a product of my experience, and an opportunity that I feel is needed on the world stage.’

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March 2019