EachNet

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

~ the eulogy ~

I knew EachNet as a case study long before I knew it as a website, and I suspect that is true of most people outside China who know the name at all. It is the standard story of how eBay lost China: buy the local leader, run it from San Jose, watch a free domestic rival take the entire market in three years. What the case study leaves out is that the site did not die then. It kept trading for another sixteen years and only closed in 2022.

Shao Yibo and Tan Haiyin started it in Shanghai in August 1999, both recently back from Harvard, both looking at eBay and at a Chinese consumer market with no equivalent in it. It worked immediately. By the time eBay bought a 33 percent stake for $30 million in 2002, EachNet held more than seventy percent of consumer online sales in the country, and eBay took the remainder in 2003 for a total investment near $180 million.

Alibaba launched Taobao in 2003, the same year. Taobao charged sellers nothing at all. It also put an escrow service between the two parties so neither had to trust the other first, and a chat window beside every listing so they could argue about the price the way people do in a market. eBay charged listing fees and ran the Chinese site as a regional instance of a global platform. By early 2006 Taobao had roughly two thirds of the market by users and eBay EachNet was down to 29 percent.

~ the dossier ~

~ the migration that finished it ~

The decision everybody points at is the platform move. eBay pulled the Chinese site onto its worldwide codebase, which meant the Shanghai team lost the ability to ship anything without approval from the other side of the Pacific, and the site began behaving like an American product with Chinese text laid over it. Former EachNet executives left in numbers after the acquisition, Shao Yibo among them. The wordmark from those years shows the arrangement plainly enough: the Chinese name set next to the eBay logo, with a line between them about the two companies working hand in hand.

An industry analyst named Fu Liang, quoted at the closure, put the whole thing in one line: as a wholly acquired company its decisions were made at US headquarters and it became detached from the Chinese market, while Alibaba took foreign money and kept the decisions at home. That is the entire lesson, and it is why the case gets taught.

~ the sixteen years after ~

eBay stopped trying in 2006. In December it agreed to fold the China business into a joint venture with TOM Online, which held 51 percent to eBay's 49, and the site carried on under that arrangement. Around $300 million had gone into the country by then with nothing much to show for it.

And then it simply kept going. The domain changed hands, the operator of record at the end being a Shanghai firm called Yingshi Information Technology, and eachnet.com stayed open for business straight through the whole era of the platform economy that had already left it behind. Twenty-three years is longer than most winners manage.

~ the twelfth of august ~

The notice went up on 24 July 2022. Shops had until 12 August, after which transactions on the site closed and the servers went off. The reason given was a change of operations, which is the phrasing companies use when there is nothing they want to say.

The gap worth noticing is between the death people remember and the one that happened. EachNet lost in 2006 and that is the year it enters the business school reading. The thing itself ran for another sixteen years with nobody watching it, which is how a great many of these actually end. Not a shutdown so much as a long quiet operation that eventually stops answering.

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