QXL

» see qxl.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

when online auctions finally reached me they were in turkish, on gittigidiyor, which launched in 2001 and became the place you actually bought and sold things secondhand here. qxl was the same idea one market over, in britain and germany, and it was invisible from where i was. i never had an account and never would have, because the auction site with gravity in turkey was the local one, not a london company i had no reason to find.

qxl was started in 1997 by tim jackson, a journalist turned founder, and it rode the dot-com wave hard. it went public in 1999 at a valuation somewhere near four hundred million dollars, and in 2000 it merged with ricardo, germany's big auction site, to create a company that reached across ten european countries with well over a million members and a valuation that briefly touched the billions. for a moment it looked like europe might get its own answer to ebay.

it did not. qxl came through the 2001 crash still standing, which was itself an achievement, but it never landed a real blow on ebay in the uk. the company was eventually renamed tradus and bought by the south african media group naspers for close to a billion pounds. the qxl.co.uk auction site stopped accepting bids on 9 may 2008 and shut completely at midday on 30 may, quietly, years after the fight had already been decided.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

qxl the auction site died, but the corporate shell around it was worth a fortune. naspers paid nearly a billion pounds for the group that qxl had become, then closed the front door that carried the original name. the value had migrated into the eastern-european auction businesses tucked inside the company, so the brand everyone remembered was switched off while the parent walked away rich. the name lost and the balance sheet won.

~ the day it died ~

the ending was almost polite. bids stopped on a friday, the site closed at noon a few weeks later, and there was no drama, because the outcome had been obvious for years. qxl had proved that europe wanted online auctions and had failed to prove that europe wanted them from qxl. by 2008 the answer to who ran auctions on this continent was already a single word, and it was not this one.

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