Five up-and-coming UK marketplaces that you need to know

A cool $1.97trn (£1.5trn) was spent globally on the top 100 online marketplaces in 2019, according to research from Digital Commerce 360. 

While two very big players, Amazon and Alibaba, still dominate the spend, the market remains buoyant with new players emerging all the time, offering new niches and target customers.

Retail Week hones in on five new marketplaces worthy of your attention, all of which are gaining traction and could provide a useful route to market for brands. 

Fruugo 

Fruugo has a slightly convoluted history. The marketplace was founded in Finland in 2008, initially as a business-to-consumer site for those living in the Scandinavian and Baltic regions. Four years later, its chief executive Dominic Allonby acquired the company and exited Helsinki to start afresh in the UK.

With a far-reaching product range – it offers everything from a Minecraft poster to a stainless-steel pipe – Fruugo sells across multiple categories and price points.

Offering a staggering 10 million products and 20,000 brands, it’s unsurprising to find that its mantra is ‘Everything for everyone, everywhere’.

Allonby says the key to Fruugo’s platform is its “single global basket” technology, with the customer able to shop from any retailer in the world in their own language, prices, currency and local payment methods, with applicable sales tax and shipping included. 

“It makes global shopping feel local for the consumer in a way that no other website does”

Dominic Allonby, Fruugo

“This means a single shopping cart can – and often does – include goods from multiple retailers in multiple countries,” he says.

“It makes global shopping feel local for the consumer in a way that no other website does.”

Fruugo has certainly swayed retail leaders, with Lord Stuart Rose and Angus Monro among those investing in the platform. 

Despite a worrying economic backdrop, the company is set to report gross transactional value of €100m this year and claims to have attracted 2 million new customers over the past 12 months.

“The challenges we have overcome this year have been ones no one could have predicted: an overnight, company-wide move to home working; rapid deployment of enhanced customer and retailer online support and service systems; scaling up of technical infrastructure as demand soared; and the recruitment of many new staff across many disciplines to help us cope with a surge in sales from every corner of the globe,” says Allonby.

“We have evolved and strengthened all the fundamentals of the business, even ahead of our previous intensive roadmap, and this puts us in greater shape than ever for the future.”

On the agenda for 2021 is rolling out to further countries and extending its white-label platform to launch vertical niche shopping sites globally.

Wakuda

Albert Larter and Nathaniel Wade want their new online marketplace to be the Etsy for Black-owned brands.

Founding Wakuda in August 2020, the duo were inspired to set up the company following the Black Lives Matter movement that spread around the world. 

“During the pandemic, at the time of the George Floyd incident and the London protests, we came together and decided we wanted to do something to help champion Black-owned businesses in the UK,” says Larter.

“Although there was a conscious shift in a lot of the population’s thinking regarding the disparities Black people and Black businesses faced, a lot didn’t know how to support it”

Albert Larter, Wakuda

“One thing we noticed was that, although there was a conscious shift in a lot of the population’s thinking regarding the disparities Black people and Black businesses faced, a lot didn’t know how to support it, hence setting up Wakuda.”

The goal, he says, is to give small and underrepresented independent UK Black-owned businesses a bigger platform, so they can be seen by a bigger audience. 

The site currently showcases more than 1,000 products from 150 businesses across categories such as home, jewellery, fashion, health and beauty, and food and drink.

“Next year we will be continuing to grow the platform and empowering the businesses while continuing to provide people with a simple way to shop and support,” says Larter.

“We will be increasing the amount of sellers we have and continuing on the journey to be the go-to-marketplace for consumers to support small, independent Black-owned businesses.”

Other Black-owned marketplaces making waves are Simply Noir, which also launched this year, and US-based marketplace We Buy Black, founded in 2015.

OnBuy.com

It’s the marketplace with huge ambitions. Founded in the UK in 2016 by entrepreneur Cas Paton, OnBuy wants to eat a share of Amazon’s booming market – and it’s working.

The company claims to be the world’s fastest-growing online marketplace, with sales shooting 870% to £170m in the year to November 2020.

And it forecasts reaching a whopping £2bn in sales by the end of 2023.

Dorset-based OnBuy serves up millions of products by thousands of retailers worldwide across product categories such as electricals, beauty, home and garden, toys and baby supplies. It sells big brands from Apple to Samsung and Lego to Chanel.

Paton, a finalist in the NatWest Great British Entrepreneur Awards last year, headed up a £5m investment in 2020.

The company plans to operate in more than 140 countries by 2023, starting with 42 initial sites early this year.

Since its launch, OnBuy has sold to 8 million customers and it says more than 400 retailers join its platform every month.

Ethical.Market

“Ethical no longer has to mean boring,” the Ethical.Market website reads. We’ve come a long way in the past decade, with fair trade, vegan and sustainable products no longer seen as being solely for hippies. 

Demand for ethically bought products has grown massively since Ethical.Market was co-founded in 2013 by Raquel Suraly Wallace. She started the online marketplace with just 10 brands after discovering the hidden costs of cheap clothing and the impact on workers in developing countries.

Today the company showcases more than 8,000 products from 300 brands, with a collection spanning beyond fashion to include jewellery, lampshades, wall art, beauty products and gifts.

Ethical.market, a member of the Ethical Fashion Forum, says it operates with a strict ethos of listing brands who care about the impact of their supply chain and believe in full transparency.

There are a rising number of ethical marketplaces today, including Bazar, which offers sustainable, pre-loved and eco-friendly products, and “Earth-friendly” platform Veo, home to hundreds of brands that align with its values: kind, healthy and green. 

Folksy 

Having launched in 2008, Folksy is not the newest online marketplace around, but it is one of the most popular sites for handmade gifts and craft supplies, enabling makers to showcase and sell their work to a larger audience.

Run by a small team of six, the site’s USP is craft and handmade goods. Folksy targets those who like to shop independent, value craft skills and like sourcing unique presents and pieces.

It’s not surprising to learn then that three of its staff are artists, designers and makers themselves, giving the team personal insight into the sector. 

“The key to being successful is not just our niche; it’s the way we’ve built a community with our sellers and focused on making selling work simple and easy”

James Boardwell, Folksy

“While other marketplaces have branched out to include vintage or reselling, we’re very much focused on handmade and craft,” says founder James Boardwell.

“The key to being successful, however, is not just our niche; it’s the way we’ve built a community with our sellers and focused on making selling work simple and easy.”

The site features more than 80,000 makers and is used by around 280,000 shoppers a month.

Although its audience is primarily based in the UK, Folksy has customers around the world, including mainland Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. Its most popular categories are jewellery, homeware and original prints.

The company says 2020 has been a strong year for Folksy, with sales up more than 130% and more than £1.25m of orders. 

There are plans afoot to continue its strong performance in 2021.

“This year we will launch an app to make it even easier for sellers to sell their makes online, features that should make it even easier to shop local and a series of online craft fair events to follow the success of two online markets run in 2020,” says Boardwell.