OnBuy.com Reviews

- OnBuy is growing fast, and almost every aspect of the company's strategy is about boosting and hyping up those impressive numbers. This is often to the preclusion of everything else, creating a single-minded strategy that doesn't notice flaws or mistakes until they're too late. - OnBuy's marketing strategy is a touch myopic - chances to capitalise on pop culture trends, movie / product releases, meme culture etc. are reacted to either too cumbersomely, months later, or not at all. Leadership, throughout my time with the business, has quite aptly summed up the primary marketing tactic as "making noise". By basing almost all its marketing on sales numbers and hype, the company is constantly leaving money on the table and getting left in the dust by far more inventive and free-spirited challenger brands. - OnBuy loves to participate in webinars, online discourses and awards of all kinds - flinging itself and any and all that arise, spreading the workforce thin and brushing up against deadlines as it furiously tries to manage having bitten off more than it can chew. - OnBuy's outlook of transparency and ethics is only put into action at such times as it would benefit the company, its hype, and its reputation. Unfortunately, this includes Glassdoor reviews, which management will harangue employees to change if they share objective criticisms of where the business is falling short. I'm therefore contributing this review after exiting the company to ensure it isn't meddled with and I'm not pressurised to amend it into endless praise. - The company recently introduced a policy that effectively gives them carte blanche to police employees' personal social media accounts, and potentially fire you if they don't like what they see. There is an obsession with reputational control that always overshadows your own individuality. I found colleagues' tendency to comb through my social media and question me on minutiae therein inappropriate and intrusive. - Clumsy, cumbersome methods of building company culture that can feel overbearing. - Work-life balance mantras that are preached rather than practiced, and only crammed into hasty social media posts because the discourse became fashionable / staff members are actually burning out / to avoid inevitable comparisons with the company culture of BrewDog. - The company's sluggish reactions to work-life balance concerns feel belated and offer little beyond platitudes. Management notices these problems after they are critical, rather than implementing preventative strategies and internal communications to set expectations among the team intelligently in terms of who works when, where and how. Amusingly, "we have been too busy growing" was given as the reason why these considerations haven't been addressed sooner (as it often is for any other considerations OnBuy has forgotten to make). Having been active in the business during its keenest growth-obsessive moments, I know that this work-life balance philosophy is shelved the moment it potentially affects the expansion of the business, or would even slightly prevent the increase of any numbers it can boast about in public. - After hiring me, the company created open positions for my skillset that offered salaries more than 25% above what I was offered when joining the business less than a year prior. Said figures were likewise above any raise I received (after begging the company to match the national average salary for my position - being passed from pillar to post for weeks while doing so). This all felt quite duplicitous, severely undervalued my own skills versus what they could command in the job market, and heavily influenced my leaving the firm. My applications to move laterally to said better-paying positions within the business were completely ignored. - While I tried to work out my notice period versus remaining holiday entitlement fairly when leaving the business, the company contradicted the information it gave me regarding my remaining holiday entitlement, and refused to pay me the monthly bonuses I'd accrued in the working year up to my exit. While there are clauses in the contract to protect the company in this regard, it feels wrong to tell everyone they are crucial to the company's success and that they have a stake in it, then not pay them that stake due to some arbitrary and self-serving rules that are entirely in OnBuy's favour. Did I contribute to your ongoing success or not? Put your money where your mouth is - or does that render the hyperbole a touch too expensive? - The usual office webchat politics of passive-aggressive-clean-up-after-yourself-this and go-grab-these-nibbles that. - It feels like every hyped-up social media post the CEO creates is flagged as 'Important!' and needing to be shared 'urgently', which is not how urgency works. - No real appreciation for the needs or expectations of more private / introverted workers, who find the demanding nature of constant hype exercises and daily meetings pedantic, intrusive and draining. - Although supportive of remote working, there's an incredibly obvious bias towards office-based working, especially in management. Even in external marketing communications, OnBuy presents working remotely as an inconvenience to be endured, rather than an incredible opportunity for talent acquisition and a positive way for more introverted workers / staff members with vulnerable dependants to fulfil their duties productively. - Expanding on the above, the company only hires people in its regional vicinity wherever possible, despite comments that talent is hard to find in said region and despite trying to characterise itself as an international business, not a regional tech startup. As someone who remote-worked for the business from afar, this means I was essentially locked out of the employee referral bonus, because the company wouldn't be interested in anyone from my region that I recommended. - Elaborating further on the office-working bias, circulated memos suggested that adherence to social distancing and covid-friendly working practices within the office were poor during 2020. This is unfortunate, and the office only closed fully when contagions among staff members were confirmed - again, reactive rather than proactive, and extremely reckless. Management would only prioritise WFH when absolutely cornered into it by circumstance or governmental guidance, and tried to characterise the business as 'essential' during these in-office 2020 months - despite the fact that OnBuy is entirely cloud- and office-software-based, and can be completely operated with a distributed workforce with no shortfall in productivity (and literally proved this to be the case with explosive 2020 growth). OnBuy has no retail or warehousing functions that would require teams of 'essential workers' to be on-site at any time - only IT and server maintenance staff at best. This is one of those companies that uses 'collaboration and culture' as a crutch for insisting on presenteeism, thereby doing nothing to innovate on collaboration and culture in such times as physical togetherness is impossible. - Well-known business-world quirks like the Peter Principle are alive and well at OnBuy! - OnBuy's content sign-off process is often lengthy and laborious, even when deadlines loom large. I quickly learned to cross my fingers that a piece of content I wrote would be seen by as few sign-off eyes as possible, or else risk spending potentially hours (!) arguing if readers know what a certain word is, whether a commonly circulated phrase is commonly circulated, if commas even work like that, on and on and on and on as one individual contradicts the next... - Written content in general is iterated on ad nauseum, even after a piece of work has actually been published(!). Editing methodology is very nitpicky - often led by personal biases, rather than true editorial objectivity. "I don't like this word" is not editing, nor is it how upholding a brand's tone of voice works. In the worst cases, this almost comical level of fussiness means that content goes live only when it's borderline-too-late to be relevant, with tonally and grammatically inconsistent editing easy to pinpoint throughout. - Inconsistent editorial feedback often almost seems driven by whims. This would often include insistence on clumsy sales patter that was at complete odds with the tone, message and needs of the piece. Almost every such brag forced into anything I wrote has been quietly proven to be a false promise by the slow but steady march of time. - Constant changing of brand-voice best practices, even when in the midst of continuous hype-building content creation. Which USPs are we raving about today? Well, you're wrong if you try and use them again tomorrow! Why? Who knows? - Because any content required is poorly instructed and defined in advance - hurriedly issued in a few vague sentences or via second-hand copy-pasted email / chat trails with no context, no clues on word counts, etc. - editing is time-consuming and heavy. Vital details are often brought up to be added at the end of a project's lifecycle rather than being crucial ideas to have mentioned at the beginning, and entire projects are begun and abandoned because they were incorrectly instructed as necessary. Questions in pursuit of clarity receive vague, unhelpful answers. The company could save so much time by developing and circulating proper content briefs, as is the industry standard in most businesses. - On the rare occasion content briefs ARE issued, they're hopelessly vague, lacking in detail, and feel as though they were created as a box-ticking exercise. - Towards the end of my time with OnBuy, there were accusations that I was reflecting aspects of the business inaccurately in my work, yet nobody had told me they had changed. There is no reason why changes to our operations, comms strategy and house style should not have been passed along to me as and when they were put into place, as both a proactive measure and, indeed, a crucial component of my job. This would have allowed me to get these details right first time and save everyone a lot of hassle in needless editing and correction. This is very basic editorial best-practice. - A good editor knows when to mark something for the writer to fix and when to actually edit and refine the content themselves to facilitate throughput and get the article out the door (discussing any concerns with the writer later, if needs be). OnBuy has far too much of the former versus the latter, which wastes enormous amounts of time. If you are highlighting one word in a paragraph and refusing to sign content off until the writer changes it - something it'd take the editor who flagged it a second or two to do, for the sake of the piece and its deadline - you are actively inhibiting the workflow and efficacy of the business. It baffles me that this level of inefficiency is tolerated, and if you question it, you just get told "this is how the content industry works". It isn't, and the fact I'd be told this as though it were news to me after a decade of working in the industry - much less as a false assertion of fact - is indicative that my 10+ years of experience were of no use, interest or merit to OnBuy whatsoever. - At the risk of belabouring this point, writing a full paragraph of what you want an article to say and then making the writer write what you have just written is not editing, it is meaningless duplication of work - you have literally just written what you want the article to say! Put it in, publish it and tell the writer about your feedback and concerns later, once we've delivered on our promised workflow objective! No other editorial process with which I have ever worked in any company, in any industry (physical publishing, marketing, B2B, B2C, PR, comms, etc.), has ever insisted on such a backward, pedantic and patronising feedback process. It hampers effective creative collaboration to an unbelievable degree, and slows a frenzied workload by OnBuy's own design to an aching, agonising crawl. - Essentially, "sign-off" became slang among many team members during my time at OnBuy for "I'm going to be busy for the last hour and a half of my day trying to write arbitrary portions of my work like you-know-who, failing, and having them just give up and write it for me after-hours anyway". - Overall, OnBuy's content pipeline is the most disorganised with which I've ever worked, in over a decade of writing and editing for a living. Projects are often begun only days or hours from their deadlines, sometimes having been known to be necessary for weeks. I either had nothing to do or everything to do all at once, with no middle ground and no way of knowing week-to-week what to expect. This was yet another decisive factor in my leaving the business. - The lack of consistency in tone of voice, and predilection to contradict what was previously set up as a brand rule seemingly at random during sign-off, meant that I eventually became embarrassed attaching my name to much of the work I produced for OnBuy. Scrumptiously ironic, considering I initially had to ask my superiors to stop stealing credit for my work. - I eventually dreaded even the idea of producing any work for the business whatsoever. Try really hard perfecting some content to the guidelines you have been given (this week)? Nitpicky editing. Half-bother and just write whatever you want? Nitpicky editing. In the end, I was put off giving 100% to OnBuy's content processes, because everything just gets pulled apart over trivialities. I departed the company partly due to its insistence on underutilising my capabilities and its need to shoehorn me into broad-stroke best practices that shifted like the tides. There's a sense of brain-drain after a while, and I feel as though I have left the firm as a less capable writer than I was when I entered it, with any sparks of creativity essentially browbeaten out of me. - Much of the above, spread over a span of months, created an undercurrent of stress and mental fatigue with the business and its practices that eventually manifested as a semi-serious health condition on my part. Although eventually signed off to recover, with superb managerial support, the company's initial response to my insistence that I was not at 100% efficacy when logging in while unwell to work (a mistake from my side, as I was trying and help shift several hype-centric ill-advised need-it-yesterday-for-some-reason projects in the pipeline) was to triple my workload and double-down on nebulous nitpicking, with occasional "Get well soon!!111" platitudes thrown in for good measure. This led to a breakdown on my part, and such a blatant contradiction of OnBuy's supposed insistence on putting the needs of its people first - while habitually failing to commit to that promise, when lost in the throes of hype - hugely influenced my departure from the company. The gulf between OnBuy's supposed values and its actual behaviour is often vast. - If my direct report was absent, I was sometimes enlisted to write entire guides for big new features of OnBuy in their stead, which nobody had told me about previously and nobody else could describe to me in any meaningful detail. So on it goes - this is now wrong, edit-edit-edit, delay-delay-delay. - For the better part of a year, marketing as a whole managed workflow on around three or four different platforms and spreadsheets all at once, rather than a single workflow management tool. However, one tool to rule them all was eventually introduced close to my leaving the business. Hilariously, everything got even more disorganised and opaque after it was implemented. - Months of work that I created got simply glossed over more than once as priorities shifted out of the blue. External comms strategies are revised sporadically, in ways that overrule the status quo just when you're used to it and it's almost approaching a rhythmic efficiency. This also means the company's marketing materials very visibly contradict themselves or feel incongruent as time goes on, undermining the trustworthiness of the brand at the broader level. - OnBuy is going global (no really, any day now probably) before resolving many of its problems (unreliable sellers, sellers lying about delivery times, counterfeit/pirate goods, scalpers and inflated prices, etc.) - meaning that these consumer-negative experiences, although not the norm, are being promoted to a hugely growing audience as the firm expands, and the company has to retroactively repair its reputation on these fronts over and over. This means many customers' first experiences with OnBuy are negative and off-putting, and it would be far more sensible to solve these problems and misconceptions before growing to prevent this from being the case - and encourage customer retention from the get-go. The success of the business and the hype surrounding it are always regarded as more important than the problems that should be pre-emptively solved before scaling up. - As you can imagine from the above point, scammers and illegitimate businesses thrive on the platform, able to sell goods fast on a huge marketplace with almost no ramifications and line their pockets with unbelievable profits. - Half an hour for lunch, and this is the only break you get per day. You can use flexitime to circumvent this, but flexitime was officially introduced over 9 months into my time at the company, so this is a more recent solution at best. It is impossible to relax over a meal and refresh the mind for an afternoon of productivity when you're constantly clock-watching. - Speaking of flexitime, it has once or twice been remarked that it will be "revoked" if the needs of the business aren't met. It's difficult to feel confident that the company is doing you a favour when the quiet threat of these perks being taken away is so casually dangled overhead. - You are expected to live, breathe and adore the business - and with a team this strong, it's easy to do so, yet OnBuy capitalises on passion and positivity by eking out every scrap of work, messaging during out-of-work hours (up to, including, and occasionally beyond midnight), persuading staff to do things on their booked time off, etc. - it largely feels as though the goodwill generated by the business and its hype is translated into a poor appreciation of personal and professional boundaries among some staff ("You're in lockdown so it's not like you have anything to do lol"). Luckily, newer executive management is trying hard to nip this in the bud before it becomes truly toxic, and the rhetoric surrounding employees' right to disconnect has become more enhanced. Par for the course for OnBuy, though, it's only being done after it became a problem, so it often feels insincere, and is preached far more than it's practised. - Old-guard management will insist you 'like' webchat messages explaining information or stating you're ready to 'smash it', and will behave more and more disruptively until everyone has done so. This behaviour completely interrupts your concentration, and it feels as though management doesn't trust the staff to read updates and messages like professional adults. - Elaborating further still on this point, there is far too much "big news coming" teasing that's disruptive and pointless. Either give us the news, or don't - the "look what I have, guess what I know, wouldn't you like to see" rhetoric loses appeal fast, yet if you don't act as if it's amazing every single time that card is played, you'll basically get nagged until you do ("need 80 thumbs up on this team", "last one to like loses equities at Christmas"). On the other other hand, if you express too much excitement, you're reprimanded for stealing the boss's thunder! - Leadership with a dangerous propensity to hire and fire, seemingly on a whim, was able to head the entire OnBuy marketing division for over a year before their damaging behaviour to the business and its reputation was even noticed or dealt with. - Elaborating on this, employees often left the business very suddenly, with no forewarning or explanation, even if they were regarded as beloved colleagues just days prior. These occurrences are never addressed again after the fact, and people who've had this happen have told me they're just told point-blank when signing in for work that they're no longer needed and locked out of all company systems there and then. The contract I received indicated the company should usually give 30 days' notice when terminating employment, and this predilection to drop people suddenly, well outside their probationary period, is highly concerning, even if it is rare. I felt fortunate to depart the business under my own initiative and on my own terms, rather than via circumstances that present strong cases for unfair dismissal and breach of contract. I am amazed OnBuy has not suffered legal ramifications for this. - Perhaps inspired in part by the above, summer 2021 saw a very polite and quiet exodus of a not-insubstantial number of marketing and tech personnel from OnBuy, one after another - some of whom seemed to have had their fill after less than a year in their positions. To clarify, contrasting the hire-and-fire mentality described above, these individuals left voluntarily, and each of them was a true asset to the business and its potential. It's curious, but perhaps not unexpected, that an initial period of involuntary team churn motivated by dangerous leadership practices eventually inspired talent churn in OnBuy that was entirely motivated by the departing professionals' own recognition of their worth. - The company seems to decide arbitrarily who does or doesn't get company-lent equipment like laptops and webcams when hiring new people. I was promised such a system comparatively late into my time at OnBuy, which just never came into being even seven months after that offer, and long after my own equipment began to show its age versus the needs of the business. Newer recruits, meanwhile, were handed all kinds of useful kit freely from the outset. I was advised to 'chase up' this situation every so often, wasting mine and the company's time, and comically enough newly hired leadership remarked that they had discovered that the IT team had not been informed at all, at any point, of my recommendation for a work-lent computer by the people who had promised to have done so. Why is equipping staff members who are stated multiple times as requiring equipment not a priority, considering the company relies on said staff members' effective labour and cohesive cybersecurity to function and grow? - There is an entire cloud drive that several team members in the company have been unable to use for months, and despite being an occasional talking point when it became inconvenient, this was never remedied during my time at the business, yet often contained vital files for my work that I would need to nag my colleagues to send me directly instead. I was constantly instructed to go tell someone about my inability to access the drive, who had already been told this many times and had not remedied the problem over the course of a year. An entire year. Why is it not being checked that each and every employee has cloud drive access if it's vital to the organisation? Why is there not a workaround, if this is unfeasible? Foundational and critical elements such as this are constantly overlooked at OnBuy, and concerns raised about them are cheerfully glossed over as someone else's problem. "It's important everyone has access to this!", indeed. - The above technical issues meant that, when a mission-critical whole-team project emerged in my final days at OnBuy (because of course it did), I could not participate or contribute to that project in any way whatsoever, as my machine was locked out of the vital company areas necessitated by that project. While it struck me as something of a punchline, I was nonetheless relieved to be able to quietly sidestep yet another last-minute hype exercise with an entirely unrealistic deadline before my leaving the firm. - To this day, I have OnBuy tech stuff I don't really understand rooted into my personal computer (e.g. the computer I personally own, not just 'a personal computer'). I don't know how to get rid of or disentangle my machine from this software and tech setup, and that nobody at the business thought to warn me about that or delete such systems from my personal property before I left. I could solve this by formatting my entire PC, I suppose, but why should I do so and put my own files at risk? I think the team responsible was too busy asking if I was supposed to be returning a fob to enter an office over 250 miles from my location, which nobody had bothered telling them that I had never been given, because I had never once entered the physical premises and lived too far away to have ever even contemplated doing so. - It took over a week from receiving the job offer (an email saying "you now work for us but I don't actually know when yet"), to actually knowing when I'd begin the position and receive the employment contract, leaving me in limbo with a severe lack of communication. At the time, I began to believe the offer had been quietly rescinded and considered resuming my job search. - Training barely exists at this business, and any new tools, systems or working methods you might need are hastily introduced and only walked through with you after something drastic has happened that means you need to use said tools/systems/methods to fix something yesterday. Nobody seems alarmed that this is the case. - The obsession with reputational control is at severe odds with the philosophy of transparency that OnBuy supposedly espouses. It feels as though you're not allowed to express anything but excitement and delight at every single thing OnBuy does. It's exhausting. - Despite all this, OnBuy's upbeat approach is completely foregone any time the company decides it wants to do something last minute (an abrupt PR stunt, a sudden sale to bump up order numbers and prevent a growth slowdown - God forbid there's any kind of growth slowdown, what would that do to the hype?). Management will happily drop this kind of last-minute work on the team (even at Christmas!), and any former commitment to work-life balance or respecting who is or isn't on annual leave and available to work is completely overridden so everyone can 'smash it'. Thanks to the poor directions often given by leadership during these intensive moments, everything needs to be done yesterday - and is created incorrectly in a mad rush as a result. Management's response is usually to just churlishly write "come onnnn" and sacrastic quips at you, rather than any meaningful clarification or direction that would guide and lead the creative process against tight deadlines. Explaining to external partners and PR professionals why they need to abandon everything they're doing, including their personal time off for Christmas, because our story is apparently the most important they'll ever get and needs publishing right this instant, is both personally humiliating and professionally unrealistic. Bizarrely, OnBuy regards being able to do stressful, highly demanding and ultimately meaningless things like this as an accomplishment. - Overall, OnBuy's sensational success and confidence has instilled a hubristic internal perspective in much of the business, and the company truly believes it's the best employer in the country, yet has little tangible evidence to this effect. In areas in which the company is either falling behind, not competitive or just outright not great, this is sidestepped and shouted over with hype, sensationalism, salesman patter and - of course - 'smashing it'. In the worst instances, the company almost seems blinkered and refuses to see where competitors in tech and retail are outpacing them in treating their staff. Why should this matter, after all, when all these lovely numbers keep getting bigger? OnBuy, in OnBuy's view, can do no wrong and always insists itself justified in its stance, however nebulous its reasoning may be.