Rakuten Deutschland

» see rakuten.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Tradoria was a real German business before it was a Japanese one. Tobias Kobier and Beate Rank started it in Bamberg in 2007 with an idea that sat between two models. A seller rented a shop front from the platform and ran it as their own store, but every store shared one checkout, so a buyer paid once no matter whose goods were in the basket. By 2011 it was one of the larger German marketplaces that was not called Amazon or eBay.

On 28 July 2011 Rakuten bought eighty percent of it. The price was never published and the German press put it in the tens of millions. Rakuten was in the middle of buying its way into a dozen countries at once, and the pitch in every one of them was the same: the Japanese model, where merchants keep their own storefront identity and the platform takes a cut rather than owning the inventory.

The rebrand to Rakuten.de came a few months later, and that was the first real problem. In Japan the name is enormous. In Germany it was a word most shoppers could not pronounce, attached to a site they had possibly used under a different name the year before. Elsewhere in Europe the same name eventually surfaced as a streaming service and as the owner of Viber, and plenty of people who used both never connected them.

~ the record ~

~ the plan ~

The 2011 target was to be Germany's leading online marketplace within five years. That deadline came and went in 2016, which was also the year Rakuten gave up on marketplaces in Britain and Spain and turned those countries into cashback operations instead. Germany was allowed to keep running.

By 2020 the numbers were not arguable. Roughly 5,500 merchants were selling on Rakuten.de. Amazon's German site had passed 300,000 active sellers two years earlier. A marketplace is a business where the merchants follow the buyers and the buyers follow the merchants, so a platform two orders of magnitude behind the leader is playing a different and much smaller game.

~ what was left standing ~

The announcement came on 25 September 2020 and the marketplace stopped accepting orders on 15 October. Rakuten's own explanation was about the continued absence of a relevant market presence, which is corporate German for we never got anywhere. Staff were given severance and help finding work. Customers holding Rakuten points were pointed at Club R, the cashback program, where the points could be spent on gift cards or on streaming credit.

What remains of Rakuten in Germany today is a cashback scheme and a streaming service, plus Tolino, the e-reader platform it co-owns with German booksellers. The marketplace, the thing the company actually came for, lasted nine years and ended with a redirect.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »