Meet Cas Paton, founder of OnBuy
Hi Cas, thank you for taking the time to speak with me, can you tell me a bit about OnBuy.com?
OnBuy.com is one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the world. With our fair, transparent approach, we offer a better deal to buyers and sellers. Our sellers can sell through a marketplace that has their best interests at heart: we offer competitive fees, don’t compete against them, and support them in growing their business. Buyers can use a marketplace that offers a seamless shopping experience with over 22 million products, competitive prices, 180-day PayPal protection, and more.
From groceries to clothing, video games to pet supplies, customers can buy literally anything from household names to small independent suppliers, all through the site.
Who or what was your inspiration to start the company?
The idea for starting OnBuy came in 2014. I had been running website development companies since I was 21 (way back in 2006!). Since then, I had worked with a lot of eCommerce sellers and would always hear how frustrated they were with the way marketplaces like Amazon operated. I realised there was an opportunity to create a marketplace that would provide a fairer eCommerce system.
OnBuy was born out of a belief that by being fair and offering transparency, we could create better experiences for both sellers and customers. We wanted to do things differently and improve the marketplace landscape, and we have. We’ve created a marketplace that favours its customers and sellers equally. As we don't compete with sellers, hold any of our own stock or sell any of our own products, our marketplace is ethical, transparent and trustworthy. All of our resources are invested in creating sales, increasing our exposure and growing our user base - all for the direct benefit of our sellers.
What made you decide to take on an industry goliath like Amazon?
Massive marketplaces don’t always offer the best experience, in my opinion. Amazon, for example, competes with its sellers by pushing its own products in the ‘Buy Box’ – which often means the customer overlooks the best deal, as they don’t notice that there are other sellers listed on the item for a lower price. From this you could see that both the buyers’ and sellers’ experiences are negatively impacted, and that the marketplace world desperately needed a new, honest and innovative offering, so I created OnBuy.
In doing so, we levelled the playing field for all sellers and provide both sellers and buyers with a better, more transparent marketplace. Unlike Amazon, we choose to focus our efforts on boosting our seller’s businesses instead. We’re not a retailer, so the market share we seek to gain is purely for the benefit of our sellers.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when starting OnBuy?
Sellers naturally want to join a marketplace with lots of buyers, which initially was the biggest challenge we faced. I’m really happy to share that we currently have thousands of sellers and over 22 million products listed on OnBuy.
As we’re constantly growing, we’re still working on increasing our product count. We’ve reached this stage by focusing our efforts on attracting both audiences and making a strong marketplace that benefits everyone.
What has been your key strategy for success?
OnBuy offers customers the opportunity to buy from sellers directly, and we charge sellers a lower selling fee than other sites. This means that sellers can pass savings directly on to customers, so that customers get the best deal possible, without cutting into their own profit margin.
We also make it very easy for customers to compare sellers without the influence of OnBuy trying to overshadow sellers. For example, we often hear feedback from converts of other marketplaces sharing that they didn’t realise that some products were substantially cheaper from other sellers, and naturally opted to purchase their items through a promoted offering, which is not always economical.
At OnBuy, we put all the power in the buyer’s hands. We show the buyer the sellers, the prices, the delivery options, but we do not influence the sale or try to push our own products – we are a true marketplace, and never sell our own stock.
This transparent and ethical approach to our operation is a huge benefit for buyers, as we’re bringing more and more major brands onto OnBuy, eager to sell through a fairer and more open platform, without conflicting practises such as competing with individuals selling second-hand products (eBay) and competing with the marketplace directly (Amazon).
Over time, consumers will see more and more products that they want, know and love at better prices.
Consumers also care greatly about the ethics of businesses. We are an ethical company, we support local economies, our offices and staff are in the UK, and we are registered in the UK for corporation tax and VAT. We have no overseas head office taking profit out of our trading locale, either to circumvent or reduce our tax liability.
We’re also supportive of small business sellers and help to grow businesses rather than compete with them to maximise our own global interests – which would be far easier for us to do! Instead, we are here to help take small traders and introduce them to national audiences, as well as take large national companies and put them on the same playing field as everyone else.
What makes you different from other marketplaces?
We are different from other marketplaces because we have buyers and sellers at the core of the business. We made sure to have lower seller fees so that all savings can be passed on directly to the customer without cutting into our sellers’ profit margin. Our marketplace has over 5,000 live product categories with more than 22 million products for buyers to choose from. Sellers can sell to 51 countries all from one place (soon to be 143!), allowing us to offer incredible choice, fantastic prices and cover all eligible orders with 180-day PayPal protection for both buyers and sellers.
Not only this, we don’t compete with our sellers by offering our own products. We support them with access to our friendly, UK-based Support team and their own dedicated account manager as their point of contact, who will in turn ensure what they’re offering is doing well and if not, we can look at methods of increasing their sales even more. We acknowledge that competitors draw buyers in with subscription services to increase sales, which is something we currently do not offer. Due to our competitive prices, subscription services may add an additional level of pressure onto our sellers - which is not something we’d want to do.
Tell me a bit more about your strategy and attitude to sellers.
Our pricing model enables sellers to offer better pricing than they can afford to do through other platforms. We realise it’s going to take time to build the product database that we want, and we’re striving to draw as many sellers onto the platform as possible, as quickly as possible.
In addition, OnBuy is not a retailer of products and does not compete with sellers - we will never sell our own stock, including never selling our own branded goods, or working with wholesalers and so on. Being transparent in this approach right from the start has allowed our sellers to trust OnBuy.
We are a fair and ethical platform, working to help grow strong selling partnerships with business sellers, who maintain healthy metrics on our platform such as: good customer reviews, efficient shipping times, minimal disputes and good customer service scores.
What business systems and software have you adopted?
OnBuy has made it really easy for sellers to list and manage their inventories, orders and customers online. We have a fully functional Seller Control Panel, where sellers can manage all their own listings.
We also have fully functioning feed systems and an API for sellers too. We’re integrated with major channel systems such ChannelAdvisor, Linnworks, StoreFeeder, Mintsoft, 247Commerce and more. Our partnership with ChannelAdvisor, one of the largest eCommerce multi-channel management systems, further improves our accessibility. The system enables sellers to manage global sales through dozens of online channels and seamlessly facilitates multi-channel relationships.
OnBuy is having great traction with Royal Mail’s Click & Drop integration and we chose to partner with PayPal to provide the service’s payment gateway in order for both buyers and sellers to benefit from a more robust level of security and protection. Using PayPal as a gateway doesn’t limit our buyers to just those with a PayPal account: we accept all major credit and debit cards, including Mastercard and Amex, plus over 140 additional payment solutions globally to provide the best possible method for the customer and clear all transactions with PayPal.
Whilst affiliated, OnBuy is completely separate from any PayPal transactions made and is simply acting as the facilitator of transactions, never holding the sellers’ money. After the item is dispatched, subject to any security checks by PayPal, PayPal pays the seller directly and they’ll get their money immediately.
We’ve launched OnBuy Fulfilment, a network for sellers with a wide variety of offerings to support their sales by connecting them with the most suitable fulfilment service. We are the first marketplace to offer this kind of service and we’re very pleased to be able to offer this to our sellers.
What does the future look like for OnBuy?
The future is looking great! This period of growth is just the beginning for OnBuy – we’re bringing so much more to the market, both in the UK and overseas. OnBuy aims to achieve £400m in annual sales within the next 18 months - that’s 5 percent of Amazon’s UK market share. This will make OnBuy the first UK company to achieve such expansion in this space.
This year, OnBuy will double our staff and launch in 141 more countries over the next couple of years thanks to our aggressive expansion plans. What’s more, we’re planning to launch a lot of exciting services in the coming months that will vastly improve the OnBuy experience for buyers and sellers.
We’ve got exciting optimisations for our sellers - including completely revamping our Deals and Boost platform which will offer the best prices to buyers.
It’s going to be an exciting few years.
