Mistergooddeal

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

~ the obituary ~

Two million euros. That is what Darty paid the M6 group for Mistergooddeal in 2014, and it is a strange figure to hold next to what the site had been for most of the previous decade. Two million euros is a rounding error at a broadcaster. It was also the whole price of a French retail brand with fourteen years of history and a warehouse.

It started on 28 January 2000 in Paris, founded by four people who had come out of the online auction business, and the original idea was simple: sell the end-of-line goods and the unsold stock the big brands wanted off their books, cheap. That worked well enough that the catalog grew into new products across appliances and furniture, then into extended warranties and buying guides. It won the French best-customer-service-of-the-year award three times between 2009 and 2012, which for a discount site is a genuinely odd thing to have on the shelf.

M6 bought it in 2005 through its Ventadis arm, the same unit that held its home shopping channel, and built an 11,000 square metre warehouse at Chilly-Mazarin in Essonne to run it out of. On 18 December 2013 M6 announced it was selling the whole thing to Darty for two million euros. The deal closed in April 2014. The warehouse shut before the end of that year and the logistics moved into Darty's own network. On 2 October 2015 the company was legally merged into Établissements Darty et Fils.

None of this reached Turkey and there is no reason it should have. French e-commerce of that era was a domestic story, fought between French brands, in French, with French delivery networks. I know about Mistergooddeal because it turned up on a list of dead sites, not because I ever had a reason to load it.

~ the case file ~

~ five more years ~

The company died in 2015 and the shop did not. Look at the Internet Archive and mistergooddeal.com is still serving a working discount storefront through the first half of 2020, with a rotating front page and a full catalog. Open the markup of a 2018 capture and the search box on that page is called dartyCom_searchfield_xxl. It had become a Darty store wearing a Mistergooddeal skin, and it stayed that way for five years.

That is a slightly unusual afterlife. Most acquired brands get switched off within a year or kept as a badge on someone else's homepage. This one kept its own domain, its own catalog and its own name, running on the buyer's engine, long after the legal entity behind it had stopped existing.

~ what the archive says ~

No trade report records the day the store actually closed. The French press covered the 2013 sale, covered the 2015 merger, and then stopped paying attention, so the only witness left is the crawler.

The last capture of a working shop is 9 July 2020. By 25 July 2020 the domain served a single page, title text Fermeture de Mistergooddeal : votre espace client reste disponible, with a Darty logo at the bottom, a button reading J'en profite, and a note that orders and invoices were still reachable through the customer account. That page sat there for at least three more years. Today the domain does not answer at all.

~ what it sold ~

The déstockage model was a real business for a while and it depended on scarcity of information. Somebody had a warehouse full of last year's fridge, you had a website, and the customer had no easy way to compare the price against forty other listings. Once every product on earth acquired a permanent price graph, selling last season's model cheap stopped being a business and became a checkbox on somebody else's filter panel.

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