PriceMinister

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

~ the last words ~

PriceMinister was france-only at the shipping layer, and that is the honest distance on this one. A marketplace is not really software. It is a set of parcels moving between people inside the same postal system, at prices quoted in the same currency, under the same consumer law, and there was never a version of PriceMinister that made any sense from ankara. Turkey had its own. So did everywhere else. This is one of the few categories where the internet stayed stubbornly national.

It was founded in august 2000 by Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Pierre Krings, in an old zeppelin factory on the Boulevard de la Villette in Paris, and the site opened to the public on 16 january 2001. The timing could hardly have been worse. Every french dot-com funded in 1999 was dying that spring, and the money for the next one had stopped moving.

It survived by being cheap to run. PriceMinister carried no inventory and took a commission on completed sales, so its cost of growth was engineering rather than warehousing. It reached profitability in september 2002, about two years after founding, and the member count went from fifteen thousand in july 2001 to a million by 2003.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Five million registered members by 2006, ten million by 2009. PriceMinister had become the thing french people meant when they said they were buying something secondhand online, in a market where eBay never got the grip it had in germany or britain. Kosciusko-Morizet was one of the visible faces of the french tech scene by then, and the company was the local proof that a marketplace did not have to be american to work.

~ the actual end ~

Rakuten bought PriceMinister on 17 june 2010 for two hundred million euros. It was the japanese group's entry into europe and it changed almost nothing at first. Kosciusko-Morizet stayed on as chief executive, then ran Rakuten's european operation until may 2014, and the site kept trading under its own name for years, latterly as PriceMinister-Rakuten while the parent worked its way onto the label.

The switch came on 1 march 2018 and finished that august. PriceMinister became Rakuten, the traffic moved onto the Rakuten domain, and a name that had been a french household word for seventeen years was retired for the sake of a consistent global brand. Nothing broke and nothing was switched off. The company simply stopped being called what it had always been called.

~ the next chapter ~

It has not stayed buried quietly. In 2026 Kosciusko-Morizet went public with an interest in buying Rakuten France back from the company he sold it to, and with an intention to bring the PriceMinister name along with him, sixteen years after the sale and eight after the brand was retired. Whether or not that comes off, it is an unusual thing to watch. A founder standing over his own product's headstone with a shovel.

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