eCOST.com

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

~ the obituary ~

eCOST shipped inside the United States. That one line settles the question of whether I was ever going to be a customer, and it settles it the same way it settled for everyone else outside the country. In 2005 the way american electronics reached Turkey was in somebody's suitcase, and a closeout site in Torrance offering free shipping over a certain order size was not part of that arrangement.

It started in 1999 as a subsidiary of PC Mall, which sold computers to businesses and needed somewhere to put what did not sell. That is what a closeout retailer is for. The stock came from returns and discontinued lines, and the price was the whole pitch.

It went public in 2004 and PC Mall finished cutting it loose on 11 April 2005, handing the remaining shares to its own holders. Internet Retailer described what walked out the door as a 180 million dollar a year business. A year later PFSweb paid 29 million dollars for it.

PC Mall bought it back in February 2011 for 2.3 million dollars plus about a million dollars of inventory, and put what it had bought inside a subsidiary called OnSale Inc. The site ran another three years under that roof. It was shut on 2 July 2014.

~ the case file ~

~ the countdown ~

eCOST sold two ways. One was an ordinary low price that sat there and waited for you. The other was Bargain Countdown, its own name for a limited run of a single item put up against a clock, which is the mechanic that later got called deal of the day and had whole companies built on top of it. The point was never really the discount. The point was that you had to be looking when the thing went up.

That works on a specific kind of shopper, the one who visits daily with nothing particular in mind, and closeout retail is where the habit was manufactured. Worth remembering that this was a 2000s idea running on desktop web pages, years before an app could put the countdown in your pocket and make ignoring it considerably harder.

~ twenty-nine million to two point three ~

The clearest thing about eCOST is its own price history. PFSweb paid 29 million dollars for it in 2006 and PC Mall paid 2.3 million to take it back in 2011. Nothing catastrophic happened in between, no lawsuit and no scandal. The business simply went from being worth a mid-size acquisition to being worth roughly what the inventory sitting inside it was worth.

That is the ordinary fate of the second-tier online store in the years Amazon was becoming the default answer. A closeout site competes on price against a company that had decided price was not the thing it was going to lose on, and the shopper who once had to hunt for the cheapest listing could stop hunting. eCOST kept trading for another three years after the buyback, which counts for something, and then somebody at PC Mall did the arithmetic on a storefront that no longer covered the staff.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »