What’s happening at Frooition
by Sue Bailey
Because a few people have asked – and more importantly, because some of their customers have read stories and are panicking – we asked eBay shop designers Frooition just exactly what’s going on there. Are they going bust?
No, said their CEO Phillip Molloy. There’s been a management buyout of the old company by Phillip and their previous MD, Grenville Whelan. The old company was closed down by an administrator, which is how you close companies, and that’s why people are seeing notices of that company being “in administration”.
The reason for the buyout is about control: Phillip says that they wanted the freedom to invest and develop the business and the old share structure didn’t allow them to do that.
There is no suggestion that the business is anything other than profitable and doing well; any debt or liability held by the old company has been taken over by the new company, which is looking forward to expanding into the USA this year. In addition, existing customers should find the platform more stable as they’ve now moved to Amazon’s web hosting (AWS) to speed things up.
Here’s Frooition’s press release on the same subject. I hope that sets people’s minds at rest.
Disclosure: Frooition used to advertise with TameBay. They no longer do so.
14 Responses on "What’s happening at Frooition"
Related Posts:
- Frooition offer for TameBay readers
- Creativebay acquired by Frooition
- Does a Frooition shop design increase sales?
- My new shop design : an update
- The Christmas Decorations are up in my eBay shop
Recent Posts
- The eNotes sing “We love eBay”
- eBay voucher event for Outlets
- eBay to give £10,000 to our favourite charities
- PayPal think I’m not a real person
- 5 things to think about before you buy a domain name
What that means in English is “company was struggling so went into administration and the previous management bought it off the administrators on the cheap.” aka a “pre packaged deal”, not good.
Agree completely with Steve. If you want to buy a company you don’t need it to go into administration. What a pile of bollocks. If you’re with them I’d suggest getting a plan B in place asap.
Plan B often involves re-investment, and a lot of eBay business are small businesses – its not always an option
I am confuzzled, a client of mine was contacted by Frooition ltd’s administrators to recover debt, but you say any debt and liability has been taken over by froo.com ltd? Speaking to a contact at froo they confirmed it needed to be sorted out with the administrator and not froo.com ltd? I’m afraid I might need someone to break this down for me!
I’ll break it down for you. Froo went bust, called in admin. admin flogged a few bits to old gaffers, suppliers get screwed, new gaffers get a clean sheet. It’s all available to view in the gazette.
Is that the same Phillip Molloy who called it an ugrade when the frooition shop design went from a customization of the whole eBay shop to just one page?
From the Frooition that caused existing customers to right off what they had invested in a store design unless they paid an additional fee for the “upgrade”
For me, as an early adopter of Frooition (back when it was Creativebay) I found the product quite reasonable. I paid a one off fee of £700(ish) and didn’t have any recurring “hosting” fees as we served our own Retrowarez to host the images etc.
Personally I think it went downhill when it became Frooition, and they started “tinkering.” However, in their defence, I suspect that as it was it wasn’t cost effective and they had to do something to bring in more money.
I realise with hindsight that we could have likely created a similar style ourselves, after all it’s only glorified css, and if I was to have an eBay shop again that’s the path I would take.
eSellerPro seem to have done the shop design for some of the eBay outlets, not Frooition. Not sure if there really is the same demand for a customised shop landing page anymore.
I’m going to get me an eBay outlet design soon….just…you….watch….
eSellerpro did Tesco, quite impressed as they don’t position themselves as an eBay design company typically.
Also the Office.
Liz, worth a go as many Outlets need to do something to improve their image after looking at their feedback
We left Frooition 10 months ago because the NSE upgrade was of very poor quality / reliability and they started having regular server downtime issues. At the same time they began charging £199 per hour for support. I can’t imagine any of these issues were good for business.
We doubled our ebay sales when we left Frooition and had our template redesigned by AsWas, and we were able to use the images for our website – couldn’t be happier with AsWas design, professionalism and aftersales service. We’re very small, but the AswAs fee paid back in 6 weeks!
We have used the company justtemplateit for a number of years and I can heartedly endorse this very professional company in all aspects of eCommerce.
I loved my Froo store initially, it was fabulous, but with NSE the whole lot fell apart, it did not look right, and I def felt that Froo was in the dark with the eBay changes.
The “upgrade” fee was a PITA in Jan 2009(£49+VAT) after the initial design fees only in July 2008 (£695+VAT), and then renewal each year, at whatever that was, it became a solution far too expensive to consider for me. I think Froo took on too many stores, too quickly, and then couldn’t maintain the level of service they once did.
Though credit to my designer Ade, who was an absolute star and very patient with the initial designs and graphics,
Tis a shame, but not unexpected TBH
Suz x
@ 7.1
BEWARE i just clicked onto a link provided by Justtemplateit’s website for techvalley and my Avast antivirus popped up telling me there is a trojan worm virus.