OnBuy’s latest AI technology innovation has unlocked an estimated £4m of GMV for sellers on the platform since it was launched at the end of April, saving the business decades of manual effort and millions in operational investment.
The unique auto categorisation solution implemented by Europe’s fastest growing marketplace leverages an AI model and vector database technology to correctly categorise sellers’ products across over 6600 categories.
The solution drastically reduces the chances of products being incorrectly categorised, making OnBuy’s platform easier to shop and increasing the chances of retailers securing sales.
To date OnBuy has auto categorised over 20 million products – a task that would have taken a team of five people over 20 years to carry out manually at an estimated cost of over £4m. The business says that categorisation accuracy is now over 93% on average.
Analysis from the British e-commerce powerhouse suggests that following implementation, 50,000 products that were first listed before the start of 2025 have been made discoverable, unlocking millions of pounds worth of untapped sales.
Cas Paton, CEO and Founder of OnBuy, said: “Our latest AI-fuelled deployment highlights OnBuy’s continued evolution as a platform. We’re using this technology to transform our business, with only a fraction of the time and investment previously required. We’ve leveraged AI to increase categorisation accuracy, which means a better, more efficient shopping experience for customers and more sales for our retailers.
“There was no out of the box solution capable of handling our unique taxonomy and product data structure, but our team of leading tech experts were able to build an agent that could handle the task.”
The technology, which is unique to OnBuy, allows the business to perform auto categorisation at scale, whilst accounting for the regulatory complexities associated with marketplaces, such as age restrictions and VAT.
Following the successful deployment, OnBuy intends to develop an agentic AI solution capable of handling non-English language categorisation, ahead of its international rollout. Future versions of the software will also take more of the hassle out of onboarding for retailers joining the platform.
With its aggressive growth strategy gathering pace, OnBuy is quickly building market share as it shakes up the retail landscape. In May, OnBuy announced it was injecting £10m to resurrect the iconic British retail giant, Comet, as a marketplace at the apex of e-commerce.
