Aucland

» see aucland.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Aucland opened in April 1999, at the exact moment when every country in Europe was working out that it needed its own eBay and that whoever got there first would take the whole thing. Fabrice Grinda was twenty four. He raised money from Europ@Web, which was Bernard Arnault putting luxury-goods profits into the web, and 17.5 million euros arrived in the first round with Arnault's fund as majority shareholder.

It grew fast enough to be counted among the three largest auction sites in Europe, and it grew loud. The television advertising is the thing French people still bring up: a burning building where the residents on the balconies bid against each other for rescue, which was pulled after complaints. That was a company perfectly aware that an auction site's real product is the greed of the person watching.

The rival was iBazar, which had launched slightly earlier and led the French market, and the two of them spent 2000 burning money at each other in the ordinary way. Then in February 2001 eBay bought iBazar outright, and the fight stopped being between two French startups. Aucland was now the local challenger to a global company that had already won the same argument in every other market it entered.

In 1999 I was fifteen and on a 33.6k modem, and buying anything at all over the internet was not something anyone I knew did. Card payments on the web arrived in Turkey years later than this, and a French-language auction site had no way to reach Ankara even if they had. The auction era was the first time the web handled real money at scale, and I watched all of it from a country where the phone line was still the expensive part of being online.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the arnault money ~

Europ@Web is a small monument to 1999 on its own. Bernard Arnault, who runs LVMH, set up a fund to put luxury money into internet companies and spent the boom buying stakes in French startups at boom prices. Aucland was one of its larger positions. Grinda sold the rest of his company to the fund in 2000 and left for the United States, which turned out to be excellent timing for him and less so for everyone still holding.

What that money could not buy was the one thing an auction site needs, which is the largest pile of listings in the country. eBay understood this better than anyone and it is why eBay bought competitors rather than out-advertising them. Once iBazar's sellers were eBay's sellers, Aucland's problem was not funding or product. It was that the buyers had somewhere better to look.

~ the last two years ~

QXL Ricardo bought Aucland in July 2002, which read at the time like a European consolidation play against eBay. QXL was a British company running auction sites across the continent and it was genuinely strong in the Nordic countries and in Switzerland. France was the market where it was not strong, and it took four more years to say so.

The wind-down was tidy in a way these things often are not. Sellers were told to finish their sales by 28 December 2006, account access stayed open until the middle of January so people could get their history out, and the site closed on 15 January 2007. By then eBay was not even the main competitive story anymore, with PriceMinister and the fixed-price sites taking the French secondhand market in a direction auctions were losing anyway.

~ what grinda did next ~

Grinda left Aucland, built a mobile ringtone company in New York called Zingy and sold it for eighty million dollars in 2004, then in March 2006 co-founded OLX with Alec Oxenford. OLX was free classifieds rather than auctions, and it was aimed at every market where the category had not been settled yet.

That is the closing joke of the French auction wars and it takes fifteen years to land. Naspers bought OLX and then bought everything it could put under the OLX name, including Slando, whose own users lost their brand in September 2014. The man whose European auction site was killed by a bigger buyer ended up building the brand that did the same thing to a lot of other people's local sites.

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