400,000 Businesses Choose eBay UK to Setup Shop

I’ve been working on a collection of articles for the new project around eBay shops, one curious question while I was half way through was “how many eBay shops actually exist?“, I didn’t know, so I counted them.

But I didn’t stop there, I put the numbers against them as well, which made for some very interesting reading and I’m sharing my findings in the table you’ll find below.

Running the Numbers

But before we get to the cool £81.4M worth of fees per annum and the approximate 400,000 shops that are on eBay UK, the numbers need a little explaining.

There are 3 shop levels, anchor at £350, featured at £50 and basic at £15 per month. Also I wanted to have a truer representation of actual numbers so for the basic shops. For the rough count of eBay shops (I counted the number of shops per page (25) and then times it by the number of pages). I deducted the featured & basic shops and then took off a 30% margin of error, because its possible for an eBay shop to appear in more than one category and also it took me ages to count them, so needed to factor in some human error too.

The total number of basic shops came in at 554,975, however with the other factors removed, I felt happy with the number of 377,037 for the basic shop count (yes I’ve rounded the total up for this article).

The Number of eBay UK Shops

SHOP SUBSCRIPTION LEVEL	NUMBER	VALUE	TOTAL (PER MONTH)
Anchor	1,075*	£349.99***	£376,239
Featured	15,175	£49.99***	£758,598
Basic	377,037**	£14.99***	£5,651,792

Notes:

* Some anchor shops are free for Outlet stores, so this number is distorted by 100 official outlets, so the number used is 1175 – 100 = 1075
** The number of basic shops were calculated as a rough estimate of the total number of shops (found here), minus the number of anchor shops, minus the number of featured shops, minus a further 30% for duplication (as a shop can appear in one or more categories & 30% felt about “right”)
*** The prices quoted are from here and do not take into consideration any discounts that maybe given to sellers (such as VAT). its also worth noting that this is a monthly fee.

400,000 eBay Shops!

WooooHaaaaa that’s an obscene number (so is the amount of revenue this creates, but that’s besides the point) I don’t know of any other platform that can boast that number shops. Shopify can only boast a tiny number in comparison.

And the kicker, we’re not even accounting for the audience that eBay commands, some 17 million visitors per month (Nielsen / Netratings, August 2010), the 30 million items that are on offer on the UK site alone and an exceptionally interesting comparison is that out of this number, less than half (180,000) are registered as business sellers.

If you want to set up shop… Go eBay!