Sell on OnBuy — The UK Marketplace That Holds No Stock of Its Own
How OnBuy's subscription-plus-commission pricing, barcode rules and seller vetting work, and which catalogues it actually suits.
7 days for £1, then from £9/month.
- OnBuy is a British marketplace that sells nothing of its own. It takes no first-party stock position, so you are never competing with the site that hosts your listing.
- It runs on a monthly seller subscription plus a category commission. There is no per-listing fee, so a large catalogue costs the same to hold as a small one.
- Listings attach to product records by barcode. If your stock has no GTIN, EAN or ISBN, that is the first thing to sort out.
- FLUF Connect drives the UK site. It can push products to OnBuy and end an OnBuy listing when the item sells somewhere else.
- You can try it with 7 days for £1, then from £9/month.
What OnBuy actually is
OnBuy launched in Bournemouth in 2016 and built itself around one promise: the marketplace holds no inventory. Amazon sells against you. eBay does not, but its fee structure and its search have been shaped by two decades of auction legacy. OnBuy started later and picked a narrower lane, a pure third-party marketplace where every product record is filled by sellers competing on price, delivery and feedback.
For a seller that has a practical effect. There is no private-label version of your product appearing above your offer, and no risk that a strong month gets read as a signal to source the item directly. The trade is reach: OnBuy’s buyer base is a fraction of Amazon’s, and you are unlikely to replace Amazon revenue with it. Sellers who do well there treat it as an additional shelf rather than a substitute one.
The company has been pushing into continental Europe, and its own seller pages now list a spread of European sites. FLUF Connect drives the UK marketplace, so everything below is written for a seller listing on onbuy.com’s British site.
What it costs to sell
OnBuy’s pricing has two parts. The first is a monthly seller subscription, charged in tiers that differ by the promotional tools and branding you get rather than by how much you are allowed to list. The second is a commission taken when an item sells, set by category. Published integrator documentation puts the range at roughly 5% to 20% depending on category, with consumer electronics at the low end and jewellery at the top. Check OnBuy’s current seller pricing before you budget, because the tier prices have moved more than once.
What matters more than the headline rate is the shape of the pricing. There is no listing fee. A catalogue of four thousand SKUs costs exactly what a catalogue of forty costs, which suits a seller with deep, slow-moving stock that would bleed money under a per-listing model. It also means the subscription is a fixed cost you have to clear every month before OnBuy makes you anything, so a seller testing the water with a dozen items is paying a real price for the experiment.
Commission is charged on the transaction value, shipping included, which is the same convention Etsy and eBay use. Price your delivery accordingly.
Barcodes, and why they decide whether you can list at all
OnBuy is a catalogue marketplace. Products live as records on the site, and your listing is an offer attached to one of them. The identifier that does the attaching is a barcode: a GTIN, an EAN, a UPC, or an ISBN for books. Integrator documentation is consistent that a GS1-recognised barcode is required to publish, with exemptions granted case by case on request.
That single rule separates the sellers OnBuy suits from the ones it does not. If you buy wholesale, retail-packaged goods, every item already carries the identifier OnBuy wants and the listing process is mostly a matching exercise. If you sell one-off second-hand pieces, handmade work or anything that never had a barcode, OnBuy is a harder channel than Vinted or Etsy and you will be applying for exemptions rather than uploading.
Used and refurbished stock is permitted where condition is declared clearly, with grading standards for refurbished goods. Used cosmetics, used underwear and a list of safety-restricted items are out. The full restrictions sit in OnBuy’s prohibited products policy.
Getting an account open
OnBuy vets sellers before they go live, and the bar is aimed at established traders rather than first-time ones. Expect to supply your HMRC registration as a sole trader or limited company, with the trading name matching your OnBuy account. Sellers based outside the UK need UK VAT registration to trade on the British site. You will need a UK bank account, or a Payoneer or WorldFirst account, and OnBuy looks for evidence of an existing sales record elsewhere.
Plan for that to take longer than opening an eBay account and shorter than an Amazon category ungating. The useful preparation is having your product data clean before you apply: barcodes present, titles consistent, condition grades decided, images that meet a retail standard rather than a resale one.
Writing offers that win the sale
Because several sellers attach offers to the same product record, your listing copy carries less weight here than it does on a marketplace where each listing is its own page. The product record does the describing. Your offer competes on price, on stated delivery speed, and on your seller metrics.
OnBuy has a featured offer position equivalent to the buy box. The exact weighting is not published, which is normal for this kind of mechanic, but the inputs sellers can influence are the ordinary ones: a competitive total price including delivery, a dispatch window you actually hit, and a clean cancellation record.
Where you create a new product record rather than joining one, the copy matters and you should treat it like a retail product page. Full title with brand and model, complete attributes, clean white-background images. Anything vague there follows the product around for every seller who later joins your record.
Dispatch, delivery and returns
Fulfilment is yours. OnBuy operates no warehouse network, so you pick your own carriers and your own packaging, and you commit to a dispatch window in your seller profile. OnBuy tracks whether you hit it.
The returns obligations are the standard UK consumer ones, with a baseline of a 30-day refund window and a longer window where an item is faulty or not as described. If a seller does not put a buyer right, OnBuy can recover the sum on the buyer’s behalf, so a returns policy you cannot honour is not a strategy.
Payment timing is one of OnBuy’s genuine selling points. Funds are recognised at dispatch rather than weeks after delivery, and released roughly a week after the expected delivery date, with a withdrawal schedule you set. For a seller managing stock purchases against incoming cash, that is a shorter cycle than several larger marketplaces offer.
Who OnBuy is right for
OnBuy rewards a particular profile. Retail-packaged goods with barcodes, a catalogue big enough that a flat monthly cost beats a per-item one, and enough margin to absorb a category commission on top of a subscription. General merchandise, homeware, electronics, toys and health lines all sit naturally on it.
It is a poor fit for single-item resale. If your stock is one-of-one clothing, vintage, or anything without a manufacturer identifier, your time is better spent on Depop, Vinted or eBay, and OnBuy will be an exemption request per line.
The realistic framing is that OnBuy adds a second UK shelf for stock you already hold. Sellers who treat it as a place to put existing inventory at no extra listing cost tend to be satisfied. Sellers who expect it to replace an Amazon business tend not to be.
What FLUF Connect does with OnBuy
| Capability | OnBuy in FLUF Connect |
|---|---|
| Push products to OnBuy | Yes |
| FLUF detects an OnBuy sale on its own | No |
| FLUF ends the OnBuy listing when the item sells elsewhere | Yes |
| Relisting, offer management, smart pricing | Not available for OnBuy |
| Markets | United Kingdom |
The practical routine is short. Your catalogue already lives in FLUF from whichever channel you imported it from. You choose which products go to OnBuy, and when one of them sells on another channel FLUF ends the OnBuy listing so you do not oversell. When the sale happens on OnBuy itself, you mark the item sold in FLUF and every other channel comes down.
Because OnBuy is a UK marketplace, it pairs most naturally with channels your UK stock already sits on. Your existing routes from eBay, Shopify and WooCommerce catalogues are the ones most sellers extend to it.
Four things sellers get wrong
Applying before the data is ready. Missing barcodes are the single most common blocker, and they are much easier to fix in a spreadsheet than one exemption request at a time.
Ignoring delivery in the price. Commission is charged on the total including postage, so a low item price with expensive delivery costs you more than the same total priced the other way round.
Promising a dispatch window that assumes a good week. The metric OnBuy tracks is whether you hit it, not whether you meant to.
Listing a dozen items to test it. The subscription is a fixed monthly cost. A thin test cannot clear it, so the test tells you nothing except that the subscription is real.
What FLUF Connect costs
You can try it with 7 days for £1, then from £9/month. Starter is £9/month with unlimited listings and includes crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations. Relisting, offer management and smart pricing are included from Seller upwards, and none of those apply to OnBuy, so Starter covers this channel. FLUF Connect drives 55 marketplaces in total.
| Plan | Monthly | Crosslisted products |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | £9/month | Unlimited |
| Seller | £29/month | Unlimited |
| Pro | £99/month | Unlimited |
| Super Seller | Custom pricing — tell us what you need | Unlimited |
Related Guides
- Crosslist from Amazon to OnBuy: A Second UK Marketplace for Your Stock
- Crosslist from eBay to OnBuy
- OnBuy vs Amazon UK: Fees, Joining Rules and Selling on Both
- OnBuy vs eBay: Which UK Marketplace Suits Your Stock?
- Inventory Sync Across Depop, eBay, Vinted, Shopify, and Etsy
Sources
- OnBuy: sell with OnBuy
- OnBuy: prohibited products policy
- OnBuy: seller terms v3.0.0
- M2E Pro: OnBuy seller fees
- CedCommerce: barcode requirements on OnBuy
- ChannelX: OnBuy’s European rollout, March 2026
- Mintsoft: should you sell on OnBuy
Sources checked September 2026.
Subscribe to the seller news brief
The marketplace news that changes how you list, in one short email.
- Fee, policy and algorithm changes across 50+ marketplaces
- Only the topics you pick — the marketplaces you actually sell on
- Short enough to read in a minute. Daily or weekly, unsubscribe in one click
No spam. We never share your address.
Pick your topics first ›Frequently Asked Questions
OnBuy has been opening marketplaces across Europe, but FLUF Connect drives the UK site, so connect OnBuy in FLUF if you are listing on onbuy.com's British marketplace. Sellers based outside the UK can trade there, but they need UK VAT registration first.
In almost every case, yes. OnBuy attaches your offer to a product record using a GS1-recognised identifier such as a GTIN, EAN, UPC or ISBN. Exemptions are granted on request, but if none of your stock carries a barcode you will be applying line by line, and a marketplace like eBay or Vinted will be far less work.
Yes, where you state the condition clearly, and refurbished goods have their own grading standards. Used cosmetics, used underwear and various safety-restricted categories are not allowed. OnBuy's prohibited products policy has the full list.
A monthly seller subscription plus a commission on each sale, set by category and reported at roughly 5% to 20% with electronics lowest and jewellery highest. There is no per-listing fee. Check OnBuy's own seller pricing before you budget, because the subscription tiers have changed more than once.
Funds are recognised when you dispatch rather than weeks after delivery, and released around a week after the expected delivery date. You set a withdrawal schedule, and payouts go to a UK bank account, Payoneer or WorldFirst in pounds.
Not on its own. Mark the item sold in FLUF and your listings on the other channels come down. In the other direction it works automatically: when the item sells on another channel, FLUF ends the OnBuy listing so you do not oversell.
No. Relisting, offer management and smart pricing are available from the Seller plan upwards, but they are not supported for OnBuy. Crosslisting to OnBuy and ending listings when stock sells elsewhere both work on every plan, including Starter at £9/month.