Leading Online Marketplaces in the UK – The Alternatives to Amazon and eBay
With $97 billion of revenue last year, the UK firmly establishes its position as the largest ecommerce market in Europe. If you are an international brand or retailer planning an expansion into Europe, you may have already considered the UK as the first market to start trading in. Online marketplaces are thriving in this territory and represent an excellent resource for companies that want to reach a broad audience in a short time – but what are the alternatives to Amazon and eBay in the UK?
The UK is a highly lucrative ecommerce market where brands and retailers from all over the world can find vast and niche audiences seeking their products. Furthermore, the UK is a mature ecommerce market where there are well-established, robust infrastructures and a captive audience who are used to shopping online daily for any type of products, from groceries to personal care. The pandemic has undeniably forced a further ecommerce acceleration and digitalisation of older generations in the UK. Indeed, internet penetration saw an increase from 92.5% in 2019 to 96% this year.
According to the latest data of SimilarWeb, Amazon and eBay are the most visited online marketplaces in the region, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that companies opt to list their products on these ecommerce giants. However, while Amazon and eBay are global platforms that created local sites targeting UK’s consumers, there are other online marketplaces worth being considered, as they mainly direct their attention to local shoppers as they were natively launched in the UK.
The following sections will provide key insights about those platforms, which are increasingly becoming top-selling and shopping destinations in the UK, and represent great alternatives to Amazon, eBay and other global marketplaces which are already household names.
Since its launch in November 2016, OnBuy has become the fastest-growing online marketplace in the world. Considering that it was founded almost five years ago, the platform has grown rapidly and today counts over 8 million active shoppers and 7,000 merchants of small-to-medium size.
OnBuy offers around 35 million items, divided across a significant variety of product categories and subcategories, as a general marketplace. In fact, it calls itself “the direct Amazon alternative”. In terms of popularity in the UK, the marketplace records over 8 million monthly visits and around 92% of those come from local shoppers within the UK.
Similar to OnBuy, Fruugo is a broad-ranging marketplace offering over 10 million products from 20,000 different brands. So if you are a brand or retailer based in the UK and wish to boost your sales in the country or test new markets, Fruugo should be on your list.
Today, the marketplace is present in 42 countries and allows you to display your listing in 28 languages and sell with 31 currencies. Like Amazon, Fruugo has built local marketplace sites in different regions worldwide; indeed, 83% of transactions are cross currency.
Compared to a general marketplace like OnBuy, Not On The High Street targets a very niche market as it sells only goods within the arts, crafts, and gifts product category. It has become the local alternative to Etsy in the UK.
This marketplace trades exclusively in the UK, and its vital purpose is to allow creative businesses to sell their unique products to the right online audience. According to the latest report, the platform recorded over £37 million in revenue last year and counted almost 3 million active consumers.
The well-known and one of the biggest game retailers in the UK, GAME, launched back in 2017 GAME Marketplace, allowing third-party sellers to trade actively in the platform and provide to the gaming community a greater variety of products.
With over 3 million monthly visits, GAME Marketplace is one of the leading shopping destinations for video games fans, so if your business produces goods in this product category, or electronics in general, GAME should be your marketplace choice.
Launched in London in 2015, Trouva is an online marketplace focused on homeware that pursues the noble mission of helping brick-and-mortar independent boutiques find their captive audience via the platform and sell ‘hard-to-find unique pieces’.
This UK native marketplace trades in the region and Europe, and currently records over 1.6 million online visits coming from all over Europe.
As a market-leading ecommerce service provider, Arcade Retail provides a flexible retail solution that makes simple selling across international borders via online marketplaces, including OnBuy and Fruugo. Get in touch today to discover how we can make your cross-border expansion easy!
