Shoptime

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

~ the eulogy ~

Turkish television in the nineties had teleshopping too, in the dead hours after midnight when the schedule ran out. A man in a studio would spend eleven minutes on a knife that cut through a coin, and then the phone number would sit on screen for another minute in case you were slow. Nobody I knew ever called it. What Brazil did in 1995 was take that segment and give it a channel of its own, twenty-four hours a day, and then keep it running for twenty-eight years.

Shoptime came out of Multicanal's cable expansion and was the first Brazilian channel dedicated entirely to selling products, built on the American home shopping model that HSN had proved a decade earlier. It went on satellite as well as cable, which mattered in a country where the cable footprint stopped well short of the population.

It got onto the web early. There are captures of shoptime.com.br going back to February 1998, which puts it among the first Brazilian retail sites of any size, and for a while the television channel and the website were selling the same catalog to two audiences who barely overlapped. In 2005 Americanas.com bought it, and in 2006 the whole thing went into B2W Digital alongside Submarino.

From that point on it was one warehouse operation wearing three names. Submarino held the technology shopper while Shoptime kept the older customer who had first bought something from it on television. Keeping the brands separate was a bet that the names were worth more than the savings from merging them, and it held for eighteen years.

~ the dossier ~

~ ninety seconds on camera ~

The category that defined Shoptime was the kitchen. Pressure cookers and blenders, the sort of thing that demonstrates well on camera because you can show it working in ninety seconds and the result is edible. Its house brands sat in Brazilian kitchens for decades, and the recall was strong enough that the company kept the name alive long after the strategic reason for it had gone.

~ off the satellite ~

On 1 June 2023 the channel came off pay television and satellite, twenty-eight years after it launched. The stated reason was a focus on digital, which is what everyone says, and in this case it was also true: the shopping channel format had been losing its audience for a decade and Brazilian retail had moved to phones.

That left the site. For a year shoptime.com.br carried on as an ordinary e-commerce storefront with no channel behind it, which is a strange position for a brand whose entire identity was a television studio.

~ one storefront left ~

Americanas announced on 2 July 2024 that Submarino and Shoptime would both be folded into the Americanas site and app. The company was eighteen months into judicial recovery at that point, after disclosing accounting inconsistencies in January 2023 that ran into the tens of billions of reais, and running three parallel retail brands was an expense it could no longer justify.

The archive shows exactly when it happened. Through 22 July 2024 the front page was still a full storefront weighing around fifty kilobytes. Three days later the same address returned four kilobytes: a logo above a button labeled go to Americanas. By the end of that month it was a bare redirect, and today shoptime.com.br lands on americanas.com.br without stopping anywhere in between.

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