iOffer

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

~ the eulogy ~

In January 2011 AuctionBytes asked more than 2,800 online sellers to rate the marketplaces they used, and iOffer finished sixteenth out of sixteen with an overall score of 3.6 out of 10. The number underneath that one is worse: asked whether they would recommend the site to anybody else, sellers gave it 3.14. eBay came fourteenth in the same survey, and everyone hated eBay. iOffer stayed open for another eight years.

The business underneath started from a real idea. Steven Nerayoff launched it in San Francisco on 1 May 2002 around a model the site called negotiated commerce, which meant no bidding and no countdown. A seller posted an asking price or simply invited offers. A buyer either paid that price or countered, and the deal closed when the two of them agreed on a number. Listing cost nothing and iOffer took a final value fee on a sliding scale only when something actually sold. The slogan on the site said it plainly: this is not an auction, it's better.

The pitch aimed straight at people who were sick of eBay, and iOffer made defecting mechanical. A tool called Mr. Grabber would pull your eBay listings across in bulk and bring your eBay feedback score along with them, so you did not turn up as a stranger with no history. Greg Holden, who wrote books about selling on eBay, called iOffer both a complement to eBay and a reasonable alternative, which is about where it stayed for its whole life. It was never the main thing anyone did.

I have no history with this site and the distance is easy to state. What iOffer became, across the back half of its life, was a place to order replica handbags and watches by post. Turkey never needed a website for that. The Grand Bazaar has sold the same goods in person for centuries, and anyone in Istanbul who wanted a copy of something walked to it and argued about the price face to face. The customer iOffer actually served was somebody who lived nowhere near a counterfeit district and had to have it shipped.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

iOffer never built the machinery that makes a marketplace safe to be in. There was no telephone support of any kind, and the email helpdesk answered most questions with a form letter. Buyer and seller protection was thin enough that the practical fallback was PayPal's own coverage, which is somebody else's protection rather than yours. The site did run a scheme called C.O.P.S. for counterfeit complaints, modeled on eBay's VERO program. It existed. It did not work well enough.

By February 2008 the company was claiming close to a million users and around 75,000 sellers. Nobody outside could check either number, and nobody knew how many of the accounts were still breathing. That was the shape of iOffer generally: it always sounded larger than anything you could verify about it.

~ the day it died ~

The end did not arrive as a lawsuit. In March 2019 the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition put iOffer through RogueBlock, a program it runs with the card networks that lets rights holders report counterfeit sellers straight to the financial companies instead of going through a court. Mastercard was part of it. Payment access was cut across nearly every method the site accepted, and iOffer went dark almost at once, because a marketplace that cannot take money is not a marketplace.

There was a condition attached. Processing would resume as soon as iOffer could demonstrate the problem had been fixed. It never demonstrated that. In December 2019 the front page said all services had been terminated permanently, and that was the entire notice. Seventeen years closed by a decision taken at the payments layer, with no judgment to appeal and nobody to appeal it to.

~ the long tail ~

The sellers did not stop selling. They went to DHgate and AliExpress and into the messaging apps, and the trade iOffer used to host is bigger now than it ever was there. What actually died was a specific arrangement: the counterfeit market running on a Western site with a San Francisco address and an American founder, which is exactly what made it reachable by American institutions. Move the same trade onto platforms incorporated somewhere else and RogueBlock has nobody left to phone.

The negotiated-commerce idea outlived the site, and did better without it. Every marketplace now puts a make-an-offer button next to the price, eBay included. iOffer was right that most people would rather name a number than watch a clock run down, and it never got any credit for being right, largely because of what people ended up buying that way.

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