At a glance
Headline gross sales through OnBuy in the period. Sum of every order’s customer-paid total (order.amountfrom theGET /ordersendpoint), gross of OnBuy commission and gross of refunds. The number a UK marketplace seller checks first thing on a Monday before opening the OnBuy console.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your OnBuy data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A small UK home-and-garden seller, week of 21 Apr 26 to 27 Apr 26. The seller runs a 90-listing catalogue on OnBuy alongside their own Shopify store, uses Royal Mail Tracked 24 / 48 for fulfilment, and has been on OnBuy for 14 months.Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Total Revenue is the headline number, but on a fees-heavy marketplace it is rarely useful in isolation. Pair it with these:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in OnBuy’s own dashboard: The closest OnBuy-native view is:
OnBuy Seller Console (https://seller.onbuy.com) -> Reports -> Sales Report
Filter by date range and currency (GBP). The “Total Sales” column is the apples-to-apples comparison.
For a quick sanity check, the seller homepage has a “30-day sales” tile in the top-right that should sit within a few percent of our 30D figure.
Why our number may legitimately differ from OnBuy’s Seller Console:
A small gap is normal. The usual suspects:
Cross-connector reconciliation. eBay UK:
If the merchant also runs eBay UK,
ebay_total_revenue is the natural peer. They should sit in similar bands for a comparable category mix, but a 2x to 5x gap in either direction is normal because eBay has roughly 12x the UK marketplace traffic of OnBuy. Use the pair to spot channel-wide effects (UK postal strike, Bank Holiday, weather event) versus channel-specific drops.
Cross-connector reconciliation. Shopify or BigCommerce DTC:
The merchant’s DTC store is not a definitional twin (those orders never touch OnBuy), but the share is informative. The cross-platform card onbuy_xc_share_of_uk_revenue does the split. For most small UK brands OnBuy lands at 10 to 25% of DTC; if OnBuy is north of 50% the brand is marketplace-dependent and should review category exposure.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why does my OnBuy Seller Console show a higher number than this card? Three usual suspects, in this order. First, the Console defaults to “All statuses” (including cancelled orders awaiting refund); we exclude them. Second, the Console uses Europe/London time, we use UTC, so the day boundary is offset by 0 or 1 hour. Third, our sync runs every 15 minutes, so the freshest orders may not be in yet. If after checking those the gap is still more than 5%, raise it via the support form, it usually traces to a category re-classification we have not picked up. Does this number include OnBuy’s commission? No, this is gross of commission and gross of the per-order 9p transaction fee. Useonbuy_net_revenue for the take-home view. OnBuy commission tiers are 5% (basic), 7% (mid), and 9% (premium categories like beauty); plus a flat 9p per order. A typical mixed home-and-garden seller pays around 7 to 8% blended.
Why does Total Revenue look small compared to my Shopify number?
OnBuy has roughly 12x less traffic than eBay UK and about 100x less than Amazon UK. For most small brands a healthy OnBuy line is 10 to 25% of DTC revenue. If OnBuy is below 5% of DTC, you are likely under-investing (image quality, RRP completeness, Boost spend); if above 50% the brand is marketplace-dependent. Use onbuy_xc_share_of_uk_revenue to track the split.
Is OnBuy worth the effort for a small DTC brand?
For UK-only brands selling under £20k a month on DTC, OnBuy typically adds 5 to 15% of incremental revenue with low fee load (~7% blended) and minimal extra ops once the listing pipeline is in place. The platform is much more curated than eBay (no auction-style listings, fixed-price only) which suits brand-conscious sellers. The honest answer though is: OnBuy is small. If you are looking for marketplace volume, eBay and Amazon will dwarf it. OnBuy makes sense as a low-friction supplementary channel, not a primary one.
Why is today’s number volatile compared to the 30D average?
Same reason all small-volume marketplaces look noisy intra-day: with 5 to 50 orders a day, a single £200 order moves the number 4 to 40%. Use the 7D or 30D vs prior-period view for trend reading; only use “today” to spot incident-level breaks (e.g. listings disappeared, suspension applied).
My OnBuy revenue dropped 30% this week, what should I check first?
Run this playbook in order:
- Check
onbuy_suspended_listings. A single hero SKU getting suspended can wipe 30% of a small catalogue’s revenue overnight. If suspensions are non-zero, this is the cause; clear the issues OnBuy flagged in the Seller Console and request reinstatement. - Check
onbuy_alert_token_expiry. OnBuy tokens expire every 1 hour; if the refresh failed silently, our sync stops and the number looks dropped without anything actually changing on the merchant side. - Check
onbuy_sla_compliance. Below 95% and OnBuy de-prioritises listings in browse, this shows up as a slow-bleed revenue drop, not a sudden one. - Check the eBay and Amazon UK comparison. If both peer marketplaces moved with you, the cause is channel-wide (Bank Holiday, weather, courier strike), not OnBuy-specific. No action required.
- Check
onbuy_no_rrp_setandonbuy_xc_dtc_price_gap. Without an RRP, OnBuy can not show “Save X%” badges that drive click-through; large DTC-vs-OnBuy gaps trigger price-policing on supplier side.
onbuy_eu_total_revenue card when launched. Today this card is GBP-only.
How does this compare to eBay’s headline revenue number?
eBay UK reports gross revenue similarly (gross of fees, not deducting refunds), so the cards are read the same way. The big difference: eBay’s fee structure is 12.8% + 30p (final value fee on most categories) versus OnBuy’s 5 to 9% + 9p, so eBay’s “revenue minus net” gap is wider for the same gross. If a merchant runs both, treat OnBuy as the lower-fee channel and route higher-margin SKUs there preferentially.
Why don’t my refunds show as a deduction?
By design. Founders want to see headline gross when checking pulse first thing; the refund deduction is a separate cognitive step (onbuy_net_revenue). For most categories OnBuy refund rates sit at 3 to 6%, which is lower than eBay (often 6 to 10%) because the fixed-price format avoids auction-related disputes.