Catch.com.au

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

~ the last words ~

One product a day, at a price that made you check the date. Gabby and Hezi Leibovich had been clearing stock through eBay and a small online department store when they launched CatchOfTheDay.com.au from Melbourne in October 2006, taking the Woot format nearly line for line: a single deal with a countdown, gone at midnight or when the pallet ran out. The Wayback Machine has the coming-soon page on 24 October and a live deal on 1 December.

By 2008 fifteen people were moving millions of dollars of unwanted stock a month, and the brothers were already complaining that the big brands would not deal with a company that had no shopfront. Scoopon, a group-buying spinoff, arrived in 2010, and in May 2011 a round led by the US fund Tiger Global, with James Packer's Consolidated Press among the locals, paid A$80 million for 40 percent of the pair. The one daily deal grew into a full catalog and then into a marketplace for outside sellers. In June 2017 the name shortened to Catch.

Wesfarmers, the conglomerate behind Kmart and Bunnings, agreed to pay A$230 million for Catch Group on 12 June 2019 and completed the purchase on 12 August. Its own announcement called the business "profitable and cash-generative". In the year to June 2022 the site handled A$989 million in gross transaction value for 3.1 million active customers, which was the peak, and by then it was losing money for its owner every half.

Australia was the whole map. Prices were in Australian dollars and everything shipped from sheds in Victoria, so the site never had a reason to exist for anyone in Ankara. The format did cross over, in a different costume: the private shopping clubs and Groupon clones that hit Turkey between 2008 and 2012, Markafoni and Şehir Fırsatı among them, were the same idea with a Turkish warehouse behind it, and that is the version of the daily deal I actually saw.

~ the record ~

~ what the buyer wanted ~

The 2019 announcement put the logistics in the second paragraph: two fulfillment centers in Victoria, "quality fulfilment assets", and a management team that Kmart could learn from. Wesfarmers was buying an online operation because its own stores had barely built one, and it said as much, promising that Target would get "online fulfilment capacity" out of the deal. A Sydney site at Moorebank followed under the new owner and was shared with Kmart from the start.

Inside Retail's 2023 teardown carries the whole arc in its headline, from profitable to loss-making in four years. The losses were the price of scale. Amazon had opened in Australia in December 2017, and Catch answered it by spending on the marketplace and on the OnePass membership program, which Wesfarmers then spread across all of its retail brands. In the 2023 financial year the loss was A$163 million.

~ the note to the asx ~

On 21 January 2025 Wesfarmers told the ASX that Catch "will cease to trade as a standalone operating business" in the fourth quarter of its financial year. Rob Scott's statement blamed "the recent increase in competitive intensity in the Australian e-commerce sector" and said the group's other businesses, with their store networks and their loyalty programs, were better placed to respond. The half-year loss was put at A$38 million to A$40 million and the wind down at another A$50 million to A$60 million on top. Ian Bailey of Kmart Group added that the two fulfillment centers were "currently less than 50 per cent utilised", which was the argument for keeping them.

The ACCC took an interest in what would happen to unredeemed gift cards before the April deadline. The site's help pages spent their last weeks answering in the future perfect, explaining what to do with store credit "after 30 April 2025 when Catch has ceased to trade".

~ 1 may ~

Today catch.com.au answers 403 with a page titled Catch - Maintenance. Catch Connect, the prepaid mobile plans the site had sold, switched to the OnePass mobile name on 1 May 2025, so the membership program that Catch helped build outlived the shop by a day. The annual report for the year records the closure in one sentence, "On 30 April 2025, Catch ceased to trade as a standalone operating business", and moves straight on to the transfer of the warehouses.

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