BigBuy

Pros: N/A.

Cons: I rarely write negative reviews, but after 15 months of waiting, I believe other entrepreneurs deserve to know what happened to me.

On December 10th, 2024, I became a BigBuy partner and paid approximately €1,800–€1,900 for their services. My goal was to build a serious online perfume store using their catalog.

I spent months manually building my website. Hundreds upon hundreds of perfume products were entered one by one. Product pages were optimized, descriptions were written, categories were organized, SEO work was completed, and the entire business was structured around BigBuy's perfume catalog.

Then the catalog effectively collapsed.

Between 500 and 1,000 perfume products that had already been integrated into my own store became unavailable.

Even worse, more than 7,000 perfumes disappeared from BigBuy's overall catalog during this period. These were products that I intended to gradually add to my store as the business grew.

Instead of expanding my product range over time, I watched one of the largest perfume selections available through BigBuy shrink dramatically and remain in that state for over a year.

For a business built around perfumes, this was not a minor inventory issue. It completely undermined the foundation of the entire project.

I wasn't running a general store with thousands of unrelated products. I built a specialized perfume business based on the catalog that BigBuy was promoting and providing.

For the next 15 months, I received repeated assurances that the situation would improve. I was told to wait. Then wait again. Then wait some more.

Nothing changed.

Instead of restoring the catalog, BigBuy repeatedly extended my contract. Three separate extensions were offered, but extensions are meaningless when the underlying problem remains unresolved.

An extra month, two months, or even six months has no value if the products that generated the business are still unavailable.

What makes this situation even more difficult to accept is that I specifically chose BigBuy because of the size of its perfume catalog.

One of the main reasons I invested nearly €2,000 and committed months of work was the expectation that I would be able to gradually expand my store using thousands of products available through their platform.

Instead, the opposite happened.

The catalog I relied on became progressively smaller, with thousands of perfume products disappearing from availability and remaining unavailable for an extended period of time.

The damage went far beyond inventory issues.

Like many business owners, I made plans based on the expectation that the catalog would remain operational. I spent additional money on marketing preparations, branding, website improvements, promotional concepts, and business development activities. Discussions and arrangements with influencers and potential promotional partners became pointless because the products I intended to promote were no longer available.

Marketing opportunities were missed. Growth plans were cancelled. Time and money continued to be invested while waiting for a solution that never arrived.

The result was devastating:

More than a year of lost time.
A fully developed perfume store that became impossible to operate.
Hundreds of products manually added one by one for nothing.
Marketing work that became worthless.
SEO efforts that became worthless.
Countless hours of product research, optimization, and website development wasted.
Business opportunities that could not be recovered.
Influencer collaborations and promotional plans that could not move forward as intended.
Additional money spent on business development with little or no return.
A business project that ultimately had to be abandoned.

During all this time, I managed to make only 5 sales.

Think about that for a moment.

After paying nearly €2,000, spending countless hours building a store, manually creating and organizing hundreds of products, investing in marketing plans, preparing collaborations, and waiting over a year for solutions, the outcome was only 5 sales before the business became unsustainable.

What frustrates me most is not the stock issue itself. Supply problems can happen in any industry.

The real problem is that I continued investing time, effort, and hope into a system that never returned to normal despite repeated assurances that it would.

At no point was there a clear resolution, a realistic timeline, or a meaningful compensation for the damage caused to businesses that depended on this catalog.

If you are considering BigBuy as a supplier for perfumes, ask yourself a simple question:

Would you invest €1,800–€1,900, spend months building a business, commit additional money to marketing and growth, and dedicate countless hours of work if you knew your main product category could remain unavailable for more than 15 months?

Had I known what was coming, I would never have chosen BigBuy.

Fifteen months later, the perfume category still has not recovered, my business never had the opportunity to grow as planned, and the time and money invested can never be recovered.

My experience has been extremely disappointing, financially damaging, and a complete waste of valuable business time.

Overall: I cannot recommend BigBuy to anyone planning to build a perfume business.