Rakuten (which, in its home market, is much bigger than Amazon Japan) today announced it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire California-based shopping portal Buy.com for $250 million next month.
Buy.com has been pretty "lame" as of lately.. some decent deals but the site seemed to be slow, down, missing items or simply not working a lot. Plus the merchandising is pretty crappy. Wonder what "rakuten" plans on doing with it.
Sgt_Kickaxe
2:46 am on May 21, 2010 (gmt 0)
The domain alone was worth that.
The current site design though, in my opinion, is too busy with tiny text links to a bazillion different things. The site would do well to remove 90% of the "stuff" on the index page in favor of an oversized "What do you want to buy" link.
I wonder what sort of plans Rakuten has for this network. I haven't followed the progress of their LinkShare acquisition. It was my impression that that company was floundering a bit.
tim222
12:15 am on May 22, 2010 (gmt 0)
One great thing about crazy numbers like $250M for a website is that it drives up the value of our websites. When big names are fetching hundreds of millions of dollars, and Twitter is supposedly worth $1B, it doesn't seem far-fetched that many of us might own sites worth over a million dollars :-)
walkman
8:22 am on May 22, 2010 (gmt 0)
"One great thing about crazy numbers like $250M for a website is that it drives up the value of our websites. "
tim222, buy.com has been there for ages, not to mention that technically amazon.com is just a website.
fearlessrick
11:25 am on May 24, 2010 (gmt 0)
This deal is gonna put the kibosh on eBay, for sure. Buy.com is currently eBay's largest merchant, a diamond seller. eBay CEO John Donahoe has opted to play with the big boys at the expense of losing thousands of small to mid-size sellers.
Ooops! There goes a big merchant, to a new owner with $ to spend attracting... large merchants.
Better rethink that "disruptive innovation" you've been touting there, Johnny-boy.
