LetsBuyIt.com

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

~ the last words ~

letsbuyit was a european dot-com episode that did not really reach turkey. group-buying as a concept was already strange to a 16-year-old in ankara in 2000, when the e-commerce that actually filtered down to me was hepsiburada catalogue pages and the occasional amazon.com order via a friend with a visa card. letsbuyit was a swedish startup that floated on a german stock exchange and sold mostly to uk and dutch consumers. none of those wires connected to the parts of the european internet that turkish broadband touched in 2000.

the company was founded in april 1999 by swedish entrepreneur johan stael von holstein. the business model was demand aggregation, sometimes called co-buying or group-buying. you posted that you wanted product x at a target price. other users on the site joined the bid. once the group hit a threshold the supplier honored the discount and the price on the site dropped in real time as more buyers signed on. the buyers got a bulk price without having to organize the bulk order themselves.

letsbuyit launched a german subsidiary in november 1999, then expanded across europe through 2000. by mid-year it operated in fourteen countries. the company listed on the german neuer markt in july 2000 with the intent of raising 200 million euros but only managed to raise 66 million. the timing was bad. the nasdaq dot-com crash had started in march 2000 and the neuer markt was already in deep correction by july. the ipo brought capital but not enough capital.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

through the first half of 2000 letsbuyit was one of the highest-profile european internet ipos in flight. the swedish press wrote about von holstein as a representative figure of the new economy, founder of icon medialab as well, the kind of telegenic ceo a stockholm tech magazine could put on a cover. by the third quarter the company reported a net loss of 93.6 million euros against revenue that did not justify the burn rate, anyway. in december 2000 it filed for creditor protection in the netherlands.

~ the fall ~

the rescue came from kim schmitz, then a german investor with a reputation for buying into distressed dot-coms. schmitz put in 4 million euros in january 2001 with a further 53 million euros said to be coming from anonymous lenders. the european business press treated this as a save. it was not. schmitz had been running an insider-trading scheme on adjacent listings. he was arrested in bangkok in early 2002 and convicted in munich in may 2002 of insider trading, with a sentence of one year and eight months plus a 100,000 euro fine.

by then letsbuyit was already running on fumes. the german subsidiary filed for insolvency on 25 july 2002. the dutch parent followed on 6 november 2002. von holstein had stepped back from the operating role months earlier. the brand was renamed to ifex innovation finance & equity exchange n.v. in 2003 for an unrelated investment vehicle that had nothing to do with the group-buying business.

~ the day it died ~

the letsbuyit brand resurfaced in 2008 as a price-comparison portal under unrelated new owners. group-buying as a category came back into fashion around 2009 with groupon and its european clones, which used a slightly different mechanic (one time-boxed deal, hit the threshold or it does not run) but the underlying premise was recognizable as the same idea letsbuyit had tried to scale a decade earlier. the second-wave companies succeeded where letsbuyit failed mostly because broadband adoption and credit-card use had caught up by 2009.

the kim schmitz connection is the part of the letsbuyit story that survived past the company. schmitz went on to found megaupload in 2005 and was arrested again in new zealand in 2012 over the megaupload case. he remains entangled in us extradition proceedings as of 2026. letsbuyit was the european dot-com bust written into his early biography, anyway, the first time his name landed in the financial press as a problem rather than a solution. the company itself is mostly remembered through the people it briefly involved rather than the product it sold.

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