Kliksa

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

~ the obituary ~

Around 2012 every large Turkish holding decided it needed an e-commerce property, and Sabancı's answer was Kliksa. It started with phones and televisions and kept widening until it carried furniture and personal care, which is what you do when the plan is to be the general store rather than the electronics one. By 2014 it was in the conversation with the sites people actually used.

Being in the conversation was not the same as winning it. Hepsiburada had a decade of head start and its own warehouses. n11 had Doğuş behind it and a marketplace model that did not require holding stock at all. Kliksa competed the only way a late arrival can, on price, and the price war in Turkish e-commerce between 2013 and 2016 was fought by companies who could each afford to lose money longer than the others.

On 11 January 2016 the Turkish tech press reported that Kliksa had failed to secure the outside investment it was looking for, and that Sabancı was restructuring it under Teknosa, the group's electronics chain. The announcement was worded as continuity, and what it described was Kliksa ceasing to be a store and becoming a page: Teknosa's outlet channel for shelf-worn stock and end-of-line boxes. The site served its last real pages around 24 May 2016 and was a redirect within the week.

~ the case file ~

~ what Sabancı was actually buying ~

Teknosa was in every shopping mall in the country, and that was the asset the group was starting from. The theory of Kliksa was that a retailer with hundreds of physical stores and a brand people already trusted could bolt a website onto the front and win. A lot of large retailers held that theory in those years, in Turkey and everywhere else, and almost none of them made it work.

The reason is unglamorous. A physical chain is optimized around store margin and store stock, and an online store that undercuts the branch down the road is attacking its own parent's numbers. Kliksa was deliberately kept at arm's length from Teknosa to avoid exactly that, which left it with the disadvantages of being a startup and none of the freedom.

~ the outlet page ~

The last capture of a working kliksa.com is from 24 May 2016 and looks like any Turkish e-commerce homepage of the period, a rotating banner of campaign graphics running through televisions and a Ramadan sale. Five days later the same address returned a redirect to teknosa.com, pointing at a clearance section, with a tracking parameter on the end reading ref=kliksa.

Anyone shopping online in Turkey then remembers the routine more than the shop. You opened four tabs on the same box and then checked whether the cheapest one had it in stock or was quoting a price for a warehouse that would not answer the phone. Kliksa was one of the four tabs for a couple of years. Nobody built a habit around it, and when it went there was no announcement to notice.

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