Yahoo! Bazar

» see bazar.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Yahoo! Japan announced Yahoo!バザール on 12 September 2012 and opened it on 1 October. It was a place where private individuals sold things at a fixed price, which Yahoo was betting was a gap in the Japanese market. The country's secondhand trade ran through Yahoo! Auctions, and auctions take days. Somebody who wants rid of a used rice cooker would generally rather name a number than run a price discovery process on it first.

The company's own framing put it third in a line behind Yahoo! Auctions and Yahoo! Shopping. The launch material sold it to sellers as even easier than Yahoo! Auctions, and to buyers as shopping with the same feeling as Yahoo! Shopping. To list, you had to hold a Yahoo! Premium membership, which is a paid subscription, and register separately before you could put anything up.

Listings were gated behind a monthly fee. That gate was ordinary in Japan, where a paid tier had been the price of listing on the dominant marketplace for a decade already. From any market where putting a thing up for sale costs nothing, the whole arrangement reads as strange. Whatever the gate cost Bazar in signups, the thing that finished it was standing next door the whole time.

~ the case file ~

~ the third store ~

Yahoo! Auctions let you list at a fixed price too. Impress said it plainly in its closure report: because the same sort of transaction was already possible over at the auction site, listings on Bazar failed to grow. At the point the closure was announced, on 25 February 2013, there were about 14,000 items for sale on it, which for a country of a hundred and twenty-odd million people, on the largest website in that country, is an empty building.

Yahoo folded it rather than selling it or letting it rot. One feature made the crossing: an app function that read a product's barcode and filled in the product name and details for you, so listing took seconds instead of minutes. That was promised for Yahoo! Auctions as early as March 2013, which is to say within weeks of the announcement. The scanner was the one thing Bazar had that the auction site wanted, and it crossed over while Bazar was still open.

~ what did not transfer ~

The closure ran in two steps, both at noon. New listings and new orders stopped on 25 March 2013. Everything else, including looking at your own order history and paying or receiving money through the settlement system, stopped on 27 May. The same 25 February notice also announced the end of ワイワイマップ, Yahoo's user-made map service, for early April, so two products went out of the door inside one announcement.

One line in that notice is harder than the rest. Your ratings from Bazar, the ones you earned buying and the ones you earned selling, would not be added to your Yahoo! Auctions ratings. Eight months of being a person other people were willing to transact with did not come along to the place everybody was being moved to. On a secondhand marketplace that score is the only thing a stranger knows about you, and Yahoo! Japan asked fourteen thousand listings' worth of sellers to start again from zero in a building fifty feet away.

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