OnSale.com

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

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard the name onsale was years after the fact, reading a wikipedia footnote about the b2c online auction format. by '99 i was fifteen in ankara with a 33.6k modem and no credit card for buying consumer electronics off an american auction site. onsale was not a destination that surfaced for me in those days, the people who would have used it were US households with a corporate amex and a hunger for refurbished pcs.

jerry kaplan started onsale in menlo park california on may 24 '95. kaplan had run go corporation before that, the pen-computing startup that defined an entire genre of 1990s tech failure, he came out of it with a book titled "startup" and a thesis that auctions were the right pricing model for excess electronics inventory. onsale launched four months before pierre omidyar wrote auctionweb (later ebay) into existence on a labor day weekend in september '95.

onsale was the b2c side of the auction era. kaplan's company bought wholesale lots of refurbished or excess electronics from manufacturers and sold them through the "yankee auction," a multi-unit dutch auction format he trademarked. the bidders competed for portions of a known total quantity. the model worked well for clearing pallets of laptops or fax machines or printer cartridges, the format itself became one of the patents that ebay and amazon later licensed from kaplan for their own auction layers.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

look, by '98 onsale was running consumer auctions and a separate enterprise auctions site for corporate buyers. the company hit profitability ahead of most dot-com peers because it was actually a wholesale-inventory liquidator with an auction interface bolted on. the gross margin was real. revenue in '99 was tracking past three hundred million dollars. the press coverage in those days liked onsale because it had numbers, in a year when most peers had only traffic.

the problem was that ebay had already won the bigger story. peer-to-peer auctions scaled the way wholesale auctions did not, ebay's listings grew while onsale was still negotiating supply contracts with vendors. the business onsale ran was good, the business ebay ran was a market.

~ the merger ~

egghead software had been a strip-mall pc-software chain since 1984 and had shut all of its retail stores in '98 to go full e-commerce under egghead.com. it had a brand and a customer file but no real e-commerce engine. onsale had an e-commerce engine and a profitable wholesale model but a brand the public had not memorized. the two companies announced a stock-for-stock merger in july '99, the shareholders approved it in november, the new entity went live as egghead.com inc with kaplan as president and ceo. egghead's george orban took the chairman role.

look, the deal closed november 19 '99 at a value of roughly four hundred million dollars. the onsale.com brand was folded into egghead.com inside the next six months. the auction format kept running on the egghead.com domain but the onsale name itself stopped being used in the masthead, the original site became a redirect (roughly).

~ what got buried with it ~

the egghead.com that absorbed onsale lasted two more years. the august 2001 bankruptcy filing took both brands down at once, [[egghead-com]] inherited the same dot-com bust window that killed [[pets-com]] and [[etoys-com]] in the same season. kaplan moved on to become an academic at stanford and a writer about artificial intelligence in the 2010s. the patents on the yankee auction format lived longer than the brand, they kept generating settlement payments from ebay and amazon long after onsale itself had been forgotten as a destination site. the b2c auction model survived too, it just survived inside ebay's enterprise listings and inside amazon's outlet liquidation slot, not under the name kaplan had built.

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