Alapage

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

~ the obit ~

It took under ten days. On Tuesday 28 September 1999 France Télécom Multimédia announced it had bought Alapage.com outright, and the Journal du Net filed the story as a surprise acquisition, which it was. Patrice Magnard, who ran the company and kept running it afterward, told the paper he had been planning a stock-market listing but could not give the site's content the attention it needed at the moment it needed it, so he had decided to lean the business against a large group instead. The price was never disclosed. France Télécom already held fifteen percent through its venture fund Innovacom, and Magnard described himself as the first advertiser Voila ever had.

What the operator bought was a catalog: 700,000 references, running from books and records to video cassettes and CD-ROMs, pulling a claimed 600,000 visits a month against 14,000 items actually ordered. The company was forecasting 20 million francs of revenue for 1999 after 3.5 million in 1998, and had announced in late August that it wanted to raise somewhere between 100 and 200 million francs. The acquisition made that plan moot. Toys were due on the site within days.

Through the 2000s the shop widened past culture into computer and photo gear carried over from the Marcopoly name, and in 2002 it became the first French generalist cultural site to run a secondhand marketplace beside the new stock. On 7 April 2006 it bought Top Achat and Clust.com to get scale in hardware. Both went to Rue du Commerce in February 2009, and that sale was the first half of a longer exit. France Télécom said in January 2009 that heavy losses might end the business, went looking for a buyer, and on 1 September 2009 sold Rue du Commerce the address, the brand and the customer file. No employees went with them.

France Telecom E-Commerce, the company that had held it, came off the register on 17 November 2009. The brand kept trading under its new owner until March 2012.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the minitel inheritance ~

The registry date on the company is 18 November 1987, almost a decade before there was a web shop to speak of. Alapage began as a Minitel operation, selling books down a phone line into a terminal that France Télécom had handed out by the million, and the 1996 site was a second act for a catalog that already worked. That order of events is the normal French one, and it is the thing that makes late-nineties French e-commerce look stranger from outside than it actually was. The customers had been buying objects through a screen for a decade already. They knew how to do it. The problem was getting them to change screens.

Turkey had no Minitel and no equivalent. In 1996 there was no screen in my house that could take an order from anybody, and paying for a book that way was not an idea in circulation. When shopping did arrive here it arrived straight onto the web, skipping the terminal step entirely, so Alapage's whole early advantage is a thing my side of the map never needed and never lost.

~ what france telecom wanted ~

The stated logic in 1999 was Voila. Alapage would sit beside the operator's portal as the group's commerce counter, and the press writeup said as much. The wiring was already there: Magnard had built the site on technology from a company called Echo, whose search work was the origin of the Voila engine, and alapage.com was hosted at Echo. France Télécom was not buying a stranger.

The commerce counter never became one. Alapage spent the 2000s as a mid-size French shop in a market where Amazon and Fnac were setting the terms, and the hardware acquisitions of 2006 read now like a company trying to buy its way out of a category it could no longer win. By January 2009 the parent was describing the losses in public and shopping the assets, which is an awkward thing to announce, because it tells your own customers that the shop they are currently ordering from is for sale.

~ seventy-two hours ~

The last working capture of alapage.com in the Internet Archive is 24 March 2012 at 15:37, and it is an entirely ordinary shop. Books, DVDs, PlayStation 3 and Wii sections, gift boxes, a bestseller list with the second Millennium novel at number two and a five percent discount on everything. Nothing in it suggests the shop has two days left.

By 27 March the homepage is a 301. It points at /m/index.html on the same domain, a page titled "Fermeture Alapage.com" that first appears in the archive on 26 March 2012 at 07:16. The text is short and signed by both companies at once, "L'équipe Alapage/RueDuCommerce", and it says the offer has been transferred to RueDuCommerce.com, that the cultural categories will carry on under tabs there, and that "A compter du 26 mars 2012, RueDuCommerce.com assure la continuité de service pour les commandes effectuées sur alapage.com". Above it sits a customer service number at local call rates. By 2018, searching the word alapage sent you to Rakuten, which had bought Rue du Commerce in turn.

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