8848.com

» see 8848.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

8848 is the height of Mount Everest in meters, and it is the same number in every country that measures things in meters. That is a good name for a store that intended to be the largest thing in its market. The company behind it registered as Beijing Everest E-Commerce Network Services, so the reference was not subtle and was not meant to be.

The site opened on 18 May 1999 as the first online store in China with real stock behind it. It came out of Beijing Lianbang, a software retailer with about four hundred shops across the country, which is the part that made it work: the web page took the order and Lianbang's counters moved the box. Wang Juntao had started the division that January with four people and 160,000 yuan.

By early 2000 it was doing more than ten million yuan a month across sixteen categories. Alibaba had been founded a few months earlier in Hangzhou and was selling nothing to consumers at all. For about eighteen months 8848 was what Chinese e-commerce meant, and every retrospective written since has had to explain why the name is not the one that survived.

A store does not travel the way a website travels. Search engines and mail clients crossed borders in the 90s because they were only software, but 8848 was a courier network and four hundred counters in Chinese cities with a web page laid over the top. Even with every word translated there was nothing here for anyone outside that footprint to do with it. The pages were reachable from Ankara the whole time and reaching them was pointless, which is a different kind of distance from not being able to reach a thing at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ the man who was famous for a football post ~

Wang Juntao was known online as Laorong before he was known as a founder. On 2 November 1997 he posted two thousand characters to a sports forum about watching China lose a World Cup qualifier in Dalian, under the title Dalian Jinzhou Has No Tears. Southern Weekend reprinted it in full, and Chinese sources still describe it as the most widely read Chinese-language internet post ever written.

That is an odd credential for a retail executive and it explains some of what came next. He arrived with a name the early Chinese web already trusted, which made the money easy to raise and made the company legible to the press long before it was legible to anyone doing diligence. Jack Ma's version of the difference between them, quoted in Chinese business writing ever since, is that both of them talked and only one of them had people building behind him while he did it.

~ the listing that did not happen ~

Preparation for a Nasdaq listing started in December 1999, seven months after the site opened. Chinese rules at the time required a complicated restructuring before a domestic company could list abroad, and the restructuring is what did the damage. IDG came in and became the largest shareholder. Wang's own stake fell to 2.775 percent, which left the founder with no vote on what the company was for.

The investors wanted a B2B business, because that was what the American market was paying for in 1999, and the retail operation that had made the name was the thing they wanted cut. Approval from the Chinese securities regulator arrived in the middle of 2000, by which point Nasdaq had fallen apart and there was no window left to walk through. The consumer unit was sold to an investment company in December 2000 and Wang went with it, to run a separate company called my8848.

~ six titles on one address ~

The archive of the front page reads like a receipt. In October 2000 the title tag still said e-commerce platform. By February 2001 it said 8848 Online Trading Market, so the shop was gone from the address within about eight weeks of the sale. In August 2002 it said 8848 E-Commerce Data, after a merger the previous September. By June 2003 the page was titled Intellgent, misspelled, and belonged to a systems integration business.

Then it came back twice more. In 2004 the same domain called itself the largest Chinese-language shopping search engine in the world, and from 2005 through 2007 it called itself the thing driving Chinese e-commerce. my8848, the piece that actually held the retail operation, stopped trading in November 2001, about three months after Wang left it. That is when the store ended, and none of the six later versions of the name were the store.

~ where the number went ~

8848.com resolves today and serves a Chinese outdoor sports site run by Camel, an apparel company in Wuhan. It carries climbing news and an Everest hall of fame listing summit dates back to 1988. There is no reference anywhere on it to a shop.

The number went back to meaning the mountain, which is where it started. For a domain that spent six years being reassigned to whatever its owner was trying next, ending up pointed at the thing its name literally measures is a cleaner retirement than most of them get.

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