2xMoinsCher

» see 2xmoinscher.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Secondhand marketplaces stayed national longer than almost any other web category, because everything they depend on is local. Shipping costs, payment habits, consumer protection law, and above all the language you argue in when the parcel does not arrive. So every country got its own, and the one in Turkey was a different name entirely. That is why a site that was once the twelfth largest online retailer in France is a complete blank from here.

2xMoinsCher opened in March 2001 under a company called Trokers, founded by Aymeric and Pascaline Chotard with Patrick Moreau. The name means roughly twice as cheap. It handled both private sellers and professional ones, new goods and used, and by 2004 it had climbed to twelfth place among French e-commerce sites. It won the country's most appreciated merchant site award four years running from 2005 to 2008.

What made it different was the middle. On eBay you sent money to a stranger and hoped. Here the money went to the site instead, which held it and told the seller to ship, and released it only after you had the item in your hands and said it was fine. If you said it was not fine, the site arbitrated. In 2001 that was not a feature, it was the entire reason the category could exist for people who would otherwise never have tried it.

3 Suisses International, the French mail order catalog group, bought it in July 2006 for around thirteen million euros. Six years after that, on 18 April 2012, commercial activity stopped. The stated cause was economic difficulty, which in a marketplace usually means the volume never grew enough to cover the cost of running the thing in the middle.

~ the dossier ~

~ the escrow ~

There were two answers to the trust problem in the early 2000s and this was the expensive one. eBay's answer was feedback scores: let buyers and sellers rate each other, publish the record, and let the crowd police itself. It costs almost nothing per transaction because the participants do the work.

The escrow answer costs money on every single sale. Somebody has to hold the funds and chase the seller, and somebody has to read both sides when a camera arrives with a cracked screen. It gives a much better experience to a nervous first-time buyer and it does not get cheaper as the site gets bigger. Reputation scaled and arbitration did not, and that is most of the story of why the model ended up where it did.

~ sold to a catalog company ~

The 2006 buyer is the detail that dates the whole thing. 3 Suisses was a mail order catalog business, the kind that shipped a printed book to millions of French households twice a year, and in 2006 companies like that were buying internet properties to work out what to do about the internet. Thirteen million euros for a used goods marketplace was a reasonable price and a completely unclear plan.

What a catalog group knows how to do is buy inventory and ship it. A C2C marketplace has no inventory and ships nothing. The skills did not transfer in either direction, and six years later the site stopped trading while the group that bought it was working through its own problems.

~ the second ending ~

A company called Oncle Henry picked up the brand and the domain names in June 2012, run by the marketplace's own former finance director, Raphaëlle de Marchis. The site reopened that October after roughly half a year dark, to sellers on the thirteenth and buyers on the fifteenth. It was not the same thing. By 2018 the company behind it employed one person, and it closed for good in 2023, with the sole shareholder voting to dissolve it on 27 June.

Eleven years of a name still resolving in a browser, run by one employee. A domain kept alive is not a company kept alive, and the actual death was in April 2012 when the escrow accounts stopped moving.

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