Some companies start with a business plan. Parduota started with a simple problem: people had things to sell, and eBay felt like a maze to navigate alone.
Back in 2007, Algis Antanas wasn't setting out to build a marketplace. He was solving a smaller, more immediate problem — helping people in Lithuania list and sell their items on eBay without getting lost in shipping rules, currency conversions, and platform policies that weren't built with them in mind. What began as a hands-on, almost personal service slowly turned into something bigger. By 2017, that idea had a name and a home: parduota.com.
The maze nobody warns you about
From the outside, selling on a global marketplace looks like a solved problem. Take a photo, write a description, set a price. Done.
Anyone who has actually tried it from a small country knows the rest of the story. The listing form asks for a category from a tree with thousands of branches. The shipping section wants dimensions, weights, and a service that will actually deliver to a buyer in Spain at a price that doesn't erase your margin. Your item is priced in one currency and paid for in another. The policies are written in English, for a seller profile that doesn't quite match yours. And the first buyer question arrives at two in the morning, in a language you weren't expecting.
None of these are hard problems on their own. Together, at the end of a working day, they are enough to make most people quietly close the tab. That was the real obstacle — not a lack of things worth selling, and not a lack of buyers. Just friction, stacked high enough to stop people before they started.
One seller at a time
The first version of Parduota had no software in it at all.
It was a person doing the parts other people got stuck on. Taking the photos. Writing the listing in English. Picking the category. Working out which courier made sense for a 12-kilo part going to Germany. Answering the buyer's questions. Handling the return when it came back.
That kind of work doesn't scale, but it teaches you things a product roadmap never will. You learn which twenty categories actually move. You learn that the description matters less than the third photo. You learn that the shipping quote decides the sale more often than the price does. You learn exactly where people give up, because you're standing next to them when they do.
Ten years of that is a strange kind of research. By the end of it, the pattern was obvious: almost every seller was getting stuck at the same handful of steps, and every one of those steps was something a piece of software could do faster and more consistently than a person doing it by hand.
2017: the service gets a name
Parduota.com launched as the answer to a question that had been building for a decade — what if the help was built into the platform instead of provided one seller at a time?
The name was the easy part. Parduota is Lithuanian for sold. Not "for sale", not "listed" — sold. The past tense is the whole point. Listing an item has never been the hard part; finishing the sale is.
What changed with the launch was who did the work. Instead of a person manually bridging the gap between a seller and eBay, the platform started doing it: listings created once and pushed out, shipping options priced automatically, orders and messages landing in one place. The service didn't disappear into the software — it just stopped being a bottleneck.
What the platform does today
The specifics have grown, but they are all recognisable descendants of those early manual steps:
- Listing tools that take an item from photos to a finished, structured listing — with the category, attributes, and description handled for you rather than left as homework.
- eBay integration that publishes to a marketplace of millions of buyers from the same form you used to list locally, and keeps stock in sync when something sells.
- Shipping and fulfilment with real courier rates and generated labels, so the delivery question is answered before it becomes a reason not to sell.
- A seller dashboard where inventory, orders, messages, and performance sit in one place instead of five browser tabs.
- Four languages — English, Lithuanian, Polish, and German — because a cross-border platform that only speaks one language is just an export form.
Every one of those started as something someone used to do by hand, for one seller, at a kitchen table.
What hasn't changed
The original problem is still the product.
We didn't set out to build the biggest marketplace, and we're not trying to be a tool for people who already have an operations team. Parduota is for the seller who has something genuinely worth selling and a very good reason not to spend their evening learning international shipping regulations: the small business with a warehouse full of parts, the dismantler with stock that a buyer three countries away has been searching for, the person clearing out a garage full of things that are worth more than the local market will pay.
The promise is the same one from 2007. You know your items. We'll handle the maze.
Where this goes next
Nineteen years in, the friction hasn't vanished — it has moved. Today it shows up as pricing decisions across several marketplaces at once, as translation, as the sheer volume of listings a serious seller has to keep current, as buyers who expect an answer in minutes rather than days. Those are the problems we're working on now, and they are being solved the same way the first ones were: by watching where sellers get stuck, then removing that step.
Some companies start with a business plan. We started with a problem, and we still measure ourselves against it.
Ready to see where it ends up? Become a seller or browse what's already sold.
