Quicksales

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

~ the last words ~

Every country got exactly one of these and I have no personal claim on the Australian one. What draws me to it is the mechanism rather than the place, because Quicksales is the clearest case I have found of a company whose single best moment was handed to it by a competitor's unforced error, and taken back again eight weeks later by a regulator.

It began in January 2005 in Melbourne as OZtion, built by Philip Druce and Kelvin Yip. By May of that first year it had 2,000 members and around 9,000 items listed, which is a hobby-sized number, and for three years it stayed roughly at that altitude. Being the local alternative to eBay was a position hundreds of sites held in hundreds of countries and almost none of them converted it into anything.

Then eBay Australia made a mistake big enough to be worth 28,000 signups to somebody else.

~ the record ~

~ the six weeks in 2008 ~

In April 2008 eBay lodged a notification with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for a plan to require PayPal on almost every transaction on its Australian site. Stage one landed on 21 May and forced every seller to offer PayPal. Stage two, due 17 June, would have made PayPal or cash on pickup the only ways to pay at all.

Australian sellers were furious in a way that made national news, and OZtion was standing right there with a working auction site and no payment mandate. Sales jumped fifty percent in six weeks and membership grew by 28,000 to reach 275,000. Then on 12 June the ACCC issued a draft notice proposing to strip eBay's immunity, on the grounds that the arrangement would let eBay use its marketplace power to reduce competition in payments, and in July eBay withdrew the whole thing. The grievance evaporated and so did the reason to keep a second account.

~ passed down the line ~

The founders sold in June 2008, right at the top, for $2 million to Jumbuck Entertainment. In April 2010 Jumbuck handed it on to carsales.com for $1.1 million, which is the number that tells you what the previous two years had been like. In February 2011 it was renamed Quicksales.

Under carsales it grew into a real catalog by volume, more than 1.8 million items listed at its peak and over 515,000 member accounts, and it held second place in Australian auctions for years. Second place in that market is not a business, though. It is a rounding error next to eBay, and Roy Morgan's ranking of the country's most visited marketplaces did not include Quicksales at all by the end, with Gumtree and Kogan taking the space underneath eBay instead.

~ the last listing ~

On 18 June 2018 every member got an email saying the site would close on 30 July. Ajay Bhatia at carsales called it a difficult decision and explained the reasoning honestly enough: the company wanted to concentrate on automotive listings and the vehicle categories next to them, everything from bikes to farm machinery. A general auction site was the one thing in the portfolio that did not point at a vehicle.

Thirteen and a half years is a long run for a site whose best week came from someone else's policy announcement. The lesson sitting in it is not about Australia. A gap opened by a rival's mistake is only yours for as long as the mistake lasts, and if you have not turned the arrivals into something they cannot get back at the incumbent, you are simply holding their overflow.

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