The Maze: OnBuy, the British online marketplace operator, relaunched Comet on November 9 as a UK website for electronics and appliances sold by independent retailers. The old Comet chain collapsed in 2012, when it had 236 stores. This time, the familiar black-and-orange branding sits above a checkout rather than a shop door. OnBuy operates the site under the OnCommerce name and collects payment for the retailer. The retailer sets the price, makes the sale and gets the goods to the buyer. Comet says it carries no stock of its own.
Source: OnCommerce. OnBuy brought back Comet’s black-and-orange branding for the marketplace relaunch.
The Details:
The name has been online before. Previous owner Misco brought the Comet web shop back in August 2020 and routed orders to distribution partners. OnBuy bought the brand from Misco in May 2025 and initially targeted a launch in the final quarter of that year. The November launch is a different proposition: a dedicated place to compare offers from other retailers, running on the same marketplace technology OnBuy uses for easyShop, a separate general shopping site. OnCommerce says the launch has £10 million in backing. It hasn’t disclosed how many visitors have bought something or how much it costs to acquire one.
One checkout, separate sellers. If you order a washing machine, your contract is with the retailer listed on Comet. That seller is responsible for delivery and handles applicable refunds. OnCommerce can step in and refund a buyer on the seller’s behalf if a dispute warrants it. Comet CEO Cas Paton says he is exploring partnerships that would let people order online and collect from a shop. There’s no named partner or announced collection service at launch. For comparison, sellers on Amazon UK can ship orders themselves or pay Amazon to store, ship and handle returns for eligible stock.
More products are the easy number to announce. OnCommerce says the opening catalogue has more than one million products from 2,500 sellers. Those figures describe the range on offer; they don’t show how many sellers have made a sale. OnCommerce takes a monthly subscription and a fee on each sale that varies by product category. An approved retailer can manage listings from one account across the operator’s sites, subject to where its listings are eligible. The terms also stop retailers from using marketplace orders or messages to steer shoppers to their own websites. Another shop window can mean more orders, but it isn’t the same as building a direct customer relationship.
MarketMaze Take: OnBuy can reuse the machinery behind the checkout. The harder part is giving shoppers a reason to pick the offer they see there. Currys reported that 32% of its deliveries of large items in the UK and Ireland included installation in the year to May 2026. For a large appliance, delivery on a convenient date and getting the machine hooked up can matter as much as a discount.
The test for Comet sellers is whether orders from that storefront add enough profit to cover the selling fees and the cost of serving those customers. That’s a useful test for any marketplace that puts several shopfronts on the same technology: a new address can make a catalogue easier to find, but the operator still has to show it reaches shoppers the other sites would have missed.
