Whatever happened to Andale?

Andale. Vendio. AuctionWatch. Auctiva. Honesty.com. Marketworks. HammerTap. Terapeak. Turbo Lister. Blackthorne. eSellerPro. inkFrog. Magento.

If you have been selling on eBay long enough, at least three of those names just did something to you. You had an account. You had a favourite. You probably had a bad week when one of them changed something without warning.

I have been building software for eBay sellers since 2006, which means I have watched most of that list arrive, get big, and go. Not all of them died — some were bought, some are still going, one or two are quietly ticking along under an owner nobody expected. But the industry I joined has almost entirely been replaced, and it is worth writing down what happened to it. Partly because it is a good story. Partly because the pattern still applies. And partly because the people who built those companies were, without exception, more interesting than the software.

The man who took out a full-page ad to have a go at eBay

Start with Rodrigo Sales, because he sets the tone for the whole era.

Sales co-founded AuctionWatch while he was still an MBA student at Stanford, and raised two rounds of venture capital before he had finished the course. AuctionWatch began as a message board and a search tool that let you look across eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and hundreds of other auction sites at once — which, in 1998, was a genuinely radical idea.

eBay did not love it. When eBay moved to stop AuctionWatch displaying eBay items in its search results, Sales did not send a lawyer’s letter or write a measured blog post. He took out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to tell eBay publicly what he thought of its tactics.

Think about that for a second. A student-founded startup buying a full page in the WSJ to pick a fight with the biggest marketplace on earth. You can argue about whether it was wise. You cannot argue that it lacked conviction. That kind of thing simply does not happen any more, and the industry is duller for it.

When the fight was lost, Sales did the thing that actually defines him: he did not fold. He turned the company towards serving merchants instead, and AuctionWatch became Vendio. It ran profitably for years. In 2006 it bought Andale — one of its largest competitors — and in 2010 it was acquired by Alibaba, at which point Sales moved to a strategic advisor role and Mike Effle, his COO of eleven years, took over as CEO.

The man who invented the hit counter

Scott Samuel is the one whose fingerprints are on things you have used without ever knowing his name.

Before any of this, he ran a dial-up chat server called God’s Country through the mid-eighties and nineties — genuine early-internet territory, long before it was a career. He then had the idea of putting a visitor counter on an auction page, built a prototype on his own eBay listings to see if it worked, and found that other sellers started asking whether they could have one. He ended up presenting it to eBay’s board of directors.

He founded Honesty.com, created the auction listing tool for eBay, and later became Chief Community Officer at Andale. Reid Hoffman, who went on to found LinkedIn, credits Samuel’s early internet work in his book The Alliance.

That progression — notice a small annoyance, build the fix for yourself, discover everyone else has it too — is the founding story of nearly every good company in this industry, including mine.

The founder who went from eBay tools to healthcare AI

Andale was founded in 1999 by Munjal Shah, and it raised serious money — sources differ, but somewhere between forty and sixty-four million dollars, from Accel, Mohr Davidow and Oak Hill. At its peak it claimed more than a million and a half online merchants, and it was one of the first genuine software-as-a-service businesses aimed at small sellers, years before anybody used that phrase.

Vendio bought Andale in 2006. What Shah did next is the part I find genuinely remarkable.

He founded Like.com, one of the first consumer companies to use computer vision to search inside photographs — letting shoppers find clothing and handbags by colour, shape and pattern rather than by keyword. In 2010 Google acquired it, in what was at the time among the ten largest acquisitions Google had ever made.

Today he is co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, building large language models for healthcare, aimed at the global shortage of clinical staff.

From eBay listing tools, to a Google acquisition, to trying to fix healthcare with AI. Whatever you think about how Andale ended, the man was never short of ambition.

The man who wrote it for himself

Jeff Schlicht founded Auctiva in 1998 after writing a program to automate the tedious part of putting his own listings up. He gave it to friends and family, they liked it, and he turned it into a company. He was one of the original members of the eBay Developer Council.

By 2010, Auctiva was handling somewhere around five billion dollars of goods a year. When Alibaba bought it that August, Schlicht stayed on.

Auctiva is still going, by the way. Twenty-eight years later, through Alibaba, through a spell inside an Alibaba marketplace called 11 Main that was disbanded in 2015, through a sale in 2020 and another in 2025, it now operates independently under a different owner. Outlasting nearly everyone was not the plan, but it is quite an achievement.

The summer everyone got bought

The high-water mark was 2010. In June, Alibaba bought Vendio. Eight weeks later, in August, it bought Auctiva. Two of the largest eBay seller platforms in the world, acquired by one Chinese company inside a single summer, as part of a hundred-million-dollar plan to get into the American market.

David Wei, then CEO of Alibaba.com, was asked whether the hundred million was spent. He said there was still plenty left and that he intended to spend it as fast as he could. His stated ambition was to analyse merchant sales data and tell sellers what was about to be a hit — which, sixteen years early, is more or less what everybody in this industry is now trying to build with AI.

Between them the two deals brought a quarter of a million sellers under one roof.

Meanwhile, in Cheltenham

Everything so far has happened in California. But the story I have watched closest is British, and it started the same year I did.

In 2006, Chris Farrelly founded eSellerPro in Cheltenham. The same year I started Frooition in the West Midlands. Two UK companies, both building for online sellers, roughly two hours’ drive apart.

Farrelly’s company grew fast and grew properly. It raised two million from Notion Capital in 2010, another million in 2012, four million from Juno in 2015 and six point two million from NVM in 2017 — approaching sixteen million pounds of investment across a decade. In 2015 it rebranded to Volo, from the Latin for flight, on the back of having processed more than a hundred million items across international marketplaces in three years. At its peak it was handling around forty million orders a year. It opened a London office. The tagline was “Adventures in ecommerce”, which tells you everything about the mood of the time.

Then it got difficult, in the way these things do. By the company’s own account, in mid-2017 the business went in a different direction and stopped supporting the Volo Origin platform and the customers on it. It rebranded again, to volo.ai. In September 2019 the Origin platform and its staff were acquired by FOG Software Group — part of Constellation Software, the Canadian group that buys software businesses and holds them more or less forever — and the name reverted to Volo Commerce. The AI side continued separately and became upp.ai.

Volo Commerce is still trading today from Cheltenham, with Chris Farrelly still there as founder and chief architect, nineteen years after he started it. Its order volumes are a fraction of what they were at the peak. It has been honest publicly that the middle period was hard on its customers, and it has spent the years since rebuilding with the sellers who stayed.

I have thought about Volo more than any other company in this piece, for the obvious reason. Same year, same country, same customers, same problem. They raised sixteen million pounds. We raised nothing. For most of the 2010s that looked like the sensible way round.

I should be straight about why we could, though. I have never raised investment and I have never asked for any. Every business I have started, I have funded myself. We survived by being profitable — not by burning through somebody else’s money and hoping the growth arrived before the cash ran out. That is not a strategy so much as basic economics, and it is deeply unfashionable right up until the moment the market turns.

The one that got away

But the story I keep coming back to is not about a company that struggled. It is about the one eBay had in its hands.

Magento was built by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner at a Los Angeles company called Varien, first released in 2008. In March 2010, eBay bought 49 per cent of it for ninety million dollars. A year later it paid another ninety million and took the rest — roughly a hundred and eighty million for the most widely adopted open-source ecommerce platform in the world, owned outright, at the exact moment every serious eBay seller was starting to ask how they build a shop of their own.

In April 2012, Kutner left, saying publicly that changes in leadership had moved the company away from its original vision. Founders rarely say that unless they mean it.

In November 2015, following the PayPal split that Carl Icahn had pushed for, eBay sold Magento to the private equity firm Permira. Three years later, Permira sold it to Adobe for one point six eight billion dollars.

Read those numbers again. eBay paid around a hundred and eighty million, held it five years, let a co-founder walk, and sold it. Adobe paid nearly ten times that for the same asset three years afterwards.

I do not think anyone at eBay was stupid. I think a marketplace company genuinely could not work out what to do with a platform whose whole purpose was helping sellers build somewhere that was not a marketplace. It did not fit the org chart. It did not fit the revenue model. Nobody senior owned it, so it drifted, and eventually somebody sensibly tidied the balance sheet.

That is not a scandal. It is what large companies do with things that do not fit. But it is the best illustration I know of how eBay handles the seller side of its own ecosystem: acquire, under-invest, divest, and watch somebody else make it work.

There is a coda, and it matters for sellers rather than shareholders. Magento 1 reached end of life in June 2020. No more security patches, no more updates. Thousands of merchants who had built their entire business on it had to replatform or run something unsupported. The people who paid for that decision were not in any boardroom.

What actually kills eBay tools

Having watched this from close range, the causes are more boring than people assume. It is almost never that a competitor built something better.

Being a feature rather than a business. A tool that does one useful thing gets absorbed. eBay builds it in, or makes it free, and the company that charged for it has nothing left. That will happen again this year to a lot of the AI listing tools.

Platform dependency with no buffer. Every one of these companies lived downstream of eBay’s API. When eBay decommissioned versions, changed authentication, or banned active content in 2017, everyone rebuilt on someone else’s schedule. Firms with slim margins and no reserves did not always survive the rebuild.

Getting bought by someone who wanted something else. The most common ending is not bankruptcy. It is acquisition by a parent with a different plan, followed by a few years of no investment. The product does not die; it stops moving, and sellers drift away one at a time.

Growth you cannot switch off. Money is not the enemy, but it sets a pace. A business built to grow at forty per cent cannot quietly choose to grow at five for two years while the market recovers. A business that owes nobody anything can.

inkFrog, and why it still stings

The most recent one is the one everybody remembers, because it happened this year and it happened fast. Wix announced inkFrog’s closure by email at the end of April 2026. Export ran until 31 May. On 1 June the servers went dark.

The export carried listings. It did not carry templates, master profiles, bulk revision rules, saved drafts, scheduled listings, backups or multichannel sync. Sellers who had been there a decade found that what they could take with them was a fraction of what they had built.

We opened a migration route and rebuilt what we could before the deadline. I am not going to pretend that was purely altruistic — those sellers needed somewhere to go and we wanted them. But I have never enjoyed a competitor closing, and I enjoyed that one least of all, because the people affected had done nothing wrong except stay loyal to a product.

Why we are still here

I would like to tell you it was strategy. Some of it was. Most of it was temperament.

We never raised money, so we never had to grow at a rate the market could not support. When things went quiet, we went quiet with them.

We never bet the business on a single eBay feature, because I watched what happened to the companies that did.

And we treated absorbing eBay’s changes as the actual product. Not the templates, not the designer — the ongoing work of keeping up so that sellers do not have to. That is unglamorous, it never demos well, and it is the only reason a company founded in 2006 is still doing this in 2026.

Twenty years in one marketplace does not make me clever. Plenty of clever people are named in this piece. It makes me experienced, which is a different and less flattering thing — it mostly means I have already made the expensive mistakes and can recognise them coming.

To the ones who went, and the ones still going

Every company named here was built by somebody who noticed a problem, built the fix themselves, and then discovered that thousands of other people had the same problem. Sales with a search tool. Samuel with a hit counter on his own listing. Schlicht with a script to save himself typing. Shah with a platform for merchants nobody else was serving. Farrelly with a system for sellers drowning in channels. Rubin and Kutner with a shop you could actually own.

They were not cynical operations and they were not lucky amateurs. They were building infrastructure for online selling before anyone had agreed that online selling was a real industry, mostly without a map, frequently against the platform they depended on. Several are still building. One is now trying to fix healthcare.

The market turned out to be harder than the one they thought they were entering. That is worth saying out loud, because the survivors always get described as though we were smarter. Mostly we were more stubborn, and some of us were luckier.

I am still here. I intend to still be here in ten years. And I would rather earn that by saying useful things out loud than by being the last one left in an empty room.