Ebuyer suffers redundancies

Online reseller restructures resulting in staff changes

Although the online retail market is said to be thriving, online reseller Ebuyer has felt the heat and made nine of its product managers redundant.

Bob Armao, chief executive of Ebuyer, said: “Due to a restructure of the product management department and, as a result of significant improvements that have been made to our inventory management and order flow systems, a small number of posts were declared redundant. We were able to redeploy the majority in the business, but regrettably this resulted in four people leaving.”

Total online retail sales for 2005 are expected to reach £19.5bn in the UK, the Interactive Media in Retail Group told CRN.

Simon Brayshaw, finance director at rival online reseller dabs.com, said: “It’s a very difficult market and online VARs are not exempt from the pressures. We saw this coming last year and made some changes in the way we did business.

“We haven’t chased volume like many of our competitors. It would be nice to have more volume, we would rather be smaller and more profitable.”

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