iBazar

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

~ the obituary ~

ibazar never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a francophone-and-eu product at every layer: language, market, payment rails. i was fourteen in ankara on 33.6k dial-up in 1998 and my sense of online commerce was already amazon-shaped, in dollars, with shipping from the united states. the european peer-to-peer auction category never had a turkish node.

pierre-françois grimaldi founded ibazar under a parent company called téléstore that he co-managed with philippe viroulet. the site launched in october 1998 as an online person-to-person marketplace for the french market. within a year it had ten thousand members. by march 2000 that number was three hundred thousand. at its 2001 peak the site claimed 2.4 million registered users across eight countries: france, brazil, the netherlands, belgium, portugal, italy, spain, sweden.

in seven of those eight markets ibazar was in first place for peer-to-peer auctions when ebay bought it. the acquisition was announced on 21 february 2001 for roughly 112 million dollars in ebay stock. in july 2001 the platform was migrated to ebay servers and the ibazar site disappeared. the brand became ebay france.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

in 1998 european online commerce was mostly first-generation dot-com stores. the person-to-person auction shape existed in the united states, ebay having launched in september 1995 as auctionweb, but there was no serious european counterpart. ibazar filled that gap almost immediately. by 1999 the site was drawing enough traffic that téléstore raised expansion capital and launched a country-by-country rollout across the eu and one latin american market.

in 2000 the site did roughly 430 million dollars in transaction volume but ran unprofitably. this was the standard dot-com posture of the moment. téléstore was preparing an ipo and considering a merger with the swedish auction house tradera when ebay stepped in.

~ the actual end ~

ebay had already been building its european footprint for two years. it had bought alando in germany in 1999 and iaction in france earlier, so an ibazar deal fit the same playbook. the february 2001 announcement said ebay would issue about 2.25 million shares of common stock for one hundred percent of ibazar's outstanding shares, with a valuation between sixty-six and one hundred twelve million dollars depending on where ebay stock traded at closing. the closing happened in the second quarter of 2001 and by july the platform had been fully absorbed.

~ the next chapter ~

ebay france became the primary online auction site in france and stayed the market leader for most of the following decade. leboncoin, launched in 2006, ended up occupying the same shape ibazar had originated: free classifieds for french sellers. by 2015 leboncoin had overtaken ebay france in the classifieds category and later moved into general commerce. the ibazar brand outlasted the parent company by only a few months in name and then vanished from the european internet almost completely.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »