Play.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

Play.com was cheap because of where it stood on a map, and that map did not include me. The free delivery went to British and Irish addresses, the prices assumed a customs border I was on the wrong side of, and the entire proposition depended on a tax rule between one island and another. Meanwhile the thing that killed physical music where I lived had nothing to do with tax at all. It was an internet cafe and a folder of mp3s.

The company started in 1998 on Jersey under the name Play247.com, built by three men in their late twenties working out of the back of a shop, and renamed itself Play.com in 2000. It sold DVDs first and widened out from there into music and consumer electronics, always by post, always at a price the high street could not match. By January 2009 it was the second most popular music and video retailer in the United Kingdom, behind Amazon and ahead of everybody with actual buildings.

Everybody in Britain had an opinion about Play.com in those years, usually about the packaging or about how long something took to arrive from an island most customers could not place. Nobody minded much. A disc that cost eight pounds instead of thirteen buys a great deal of patience.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the loophole ~

Low Value Consignment Relief was a piece of customs administration meant to spare everyone the cost of collecting tiny amounts of tax on tiny parcels. Anything under the threshold posted into the United Kingdom from outside the European Union arrived without VAT, and the Channel Islands sat neatly outside for this purpose while being a short hop from Southampton.

What was designed as an accounting convenience became the business model of an entire industry. Warehouses filled up on Jersey and Guernsey, British record shops watched their own stock get posted back to them tax free, and the savings went straight into the sticker price and the free postage. It ran for over a decade before the Treasury killed the relief for the islands in April 2012.

~ what came after the tax ~

Rakuten had already bought the company by then, in September 2011, for twenty five million pounds. The Japanese buyer wanted a doorway into British retail and got one at the exact moment the doorway's advantage was being legislated away, which is the kind of timing that shows up in due diligence documents as a known risk and in the following year's numbers as a fact.

Direct retail ended in March 2013. What remained was a marketplace, meaning other people's shops renting space under a name customers trusted for reasons that no longer applied. On 23 March 2015 even the name went, replaced by Rakuten.co.uk, and a brand eighteen years in the building became a foreign parent's initials in the address bar.

~ the fade ~

The marketplace was discontinued in August 2016. There was no dramatic collapse to report by then, only a slow removal of the reasons anyone had used the site, ending with a domain that now points at a loyalty rewards program.

The lesson sits in the founding rather than the ending. A retailer whose whole edge is a border can be undone by a paragraph in a budget speech, and no amount of operating skill on Jersey was going to survive the moment somebody in Westminster decided that parcels should pay like shops do.

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