livedoor Auction

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

~ the obit ~

livedoor announced it on 26 February 2004 with 1,200 items already up across twenty-three categories. Anybody holding a livedoor ID could use it, and the site's own header made the pitch in a single line: no fees at all, for the person selling or the person buying. The design brief was openly imitative. The standing Japanese summary says the system was built to resemble Yahoo! Auctions so that switching across would be easy, and Yahoo! Auctions Japan, which had the market, charged sellers for the privilege of being in it.

Two of those twenty-three categories are worth naming. One was Gundam. The other was President!, and it held thirty things belonging to Takafumi Horie, among them his refrigerator and a five-piece speaker set, all opening at one yen. That stunt only works if you know whose refrigerator it is, and in February 2004 Horie was a household name in exactly one country.

Registration ran through a livedoor ID plus an email check, and mobile addresses were refused, which in Japan in 2004 meant turning away the address most people actually used. The rest was competent and unsurprising: proxy bidding up to a ceiling you set, a watch list, mutual ratings after a sale, a question box hanging off each listing. A bid landing in the final five minutes pushed the closing time out by another three. Payment offered five routes, one of which was posting cash in a registered envelope.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the only thing it charged for ~

On 27 April 2005 livedoor bolted on a paid tier called Auction PRO, 1,050 yen a month, billed through livedoor Wallet. You downloaded a format from your My Page, filled in start and end times down a column, and registered fifty items at once or queued a hundred for later. Until then every listing had its times typed in by hand, one at a time. So the free auction site's single revenue line was a spreadsheet uploader for people with fifty things to sell.

~ one day against one year ~

Yahoo! Japan reported its October to December 2005 quarter a week after prosecutors arrived at livedoor's offices. Its auction division was carrying 5,911 contracted stores and moving an average of 1.941 billion yen of goods every day. livedoor's entire e-commerce division, the one the auction sat inside, had reported revenue of 1.445 billion yen for the whole financial year to September 2005.

That year-end report, published on 17 November 2005, predates the raid by two months, which is what makes it useful. E-commerce revenue was up 60.2 percent, and no other livedoor division posted an operating loss. This one posted 399.7 million yen of it, and the revenue growth above it was coming from companies livedoor had bought rather than from the shops themselves.

~ three stages ~

The notice was dated 7 June 2006, signed by livedoor's commerce division, and linked from every page under a heading that translates to something more important than an auction. Listing stopped at 15:00 on 26 June and the automatic re-listing feature was deleted outright at the same minute, including on items already up. Bidding and winning stopped at 15:00 on 7 July, which left eleven days in which you could finish buying something but not start selling it.

My Page and customer support closed at 15:00 on 7 August. That was the last row in the schedule, and nothing came after it. There was no press release: the only announcement of the closure was the link in the site's own footer, which is how a trade reporter found it eight days later.

~ the word they used ~

Livedoor called this a temporary closure and gave its cause as system changes and the like. No reopening date appeared anywhere in the notice, and in the twenty years since, none has appeared anywhere else either. The Japanese encyclopedia entry runs to one paragraph and files the ending under something else entirely, the contraction of the business that followed the Livedoor incident, which is the kind of disagreement you get when a company writes the notice and somebody else writes the history.

From 24 August 2006 the auction address stopped serving pages and started forwarding to the livedoor portal instead, with a tracking parameter attached so somebody could count how many people were still turning up. It was still forwarding a decade later. The notice itself lived at auction.livedoor.com/close.html, on a host that no longer resolves at all.

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