About us

The mission

For buyers… to provide a single marketplace in which they may easily access the widest possible choice of shooting products and brands and to be able to do so at their own pace and at a time of their choosing.

For sellers… to offer the most efficient and problem free platform from which to offer their products to the largest audience of buyers available anywhere in the UK.

For software users… to deliver to registered firearms dealer’s up-to-the-minute software packages which allow them to run their businesses efficiently whilst meeting all current and future legal requirements.

The history:


Before guntrader changed things, the search for a new or second hand gun, meant a long trawl through magazines, with no guarantee at the end that the shooter would find what he she was looking for. Things were just as challenging for the retailer, who might on a weekly or monthly basis have to amend and update copy and then wait for days or weeks for the advertisement to appear. And once they made a sale there was then the question of completing the lengthy paperwork.

Alexander Andover, a keen shooter and Internet entrepreneur might not have been the first to think that there had to be a better way of doing things, but he was the first to do anything about it and on January 12th 2001 he launched guntrader.uk. Two days later the first gun was sold through the new website. The following year and after many months of intensive design and development, guntrader launched its own electronic gun register software, thereby allowing dealers to record where a gun had come from and to whom it had been sold as well as producing the various notifications.

The gun trade is by its very nature a conservative one and the challenge of convincing it to adopt the new technologies and opportunities provided by the Internet was considerable; however, slowly awareness of guntrader and what it was offering began to grow and by 2011, ten years after it had launched more than 11,000 guns were being advertised on the site and the software was rapidly becoming the default choice for the UK trade.

Currently the guntrader website receives more than half a million visits each month. Those visitors are taking the opportunity to check out the close to 26,000 guns listed. Meanwhile guntrader software, now in its sixth version, is to be found at the beating heart of more than 380 UK shooting businesses.