Rakuten buys PriceMinister
17/06/2010 at 20:23
Japanese eBay-competitor Rakuten has taken another chunk of the European ecommerce market. They’ve announced today that they’ve purchased French site PriceMinister. PM is France’s most visited e-commerce site, accessed by over 11 million users per month. It boasts more than 100,000 active sellers and over 21,000 merchants offering more than 160 million products. The French ecommerce market, having lagged behind anglophone countries for a long time, is predicted to grow at an annual average of 19.5% between 2009 and 2014, so this is a very canny purchase by Rakuten.
Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, founder of PriceMinister, said: “Rakuten is a world expert in the BtoBtoC marketplace business model. They will help us introduce innovative tools tailored to meet a variety of needs of corporate sellers throughout Europe.”
PriceMinister also has a presence in the UK and Spain. Are you already selling on there, or intending to try it? Do you buy? Let us know what your PriceMinister experience has been in the comments.
Dan Wilson says
10:54 pm on 17/06/2010
Just goes to show that plenty of people think there’s still space in ecommerce and that eBay isn’t indestructible.
Stefan says
11:23 pm on June 18th, 2010
there is still space in ecommerce. For example in Germany yatego.com is number three after Ebay and Amazon. Orders coming in from Yatego are often three times higher than from Ebay.
They call you and give you a gratis consultance and all sellers are treated equal.They want you to connect your independent store and and and….
P MULDOWNEY says
7:54 am on 18/06/2010
There is an interesting article on Rakuten in this week’s Economist.They have been operating successfully for many years,the type of quality e-Mall operation that Ebay is aspiring for.
Serious competition.
northumbrian says
10:21 am on 18/06/2010
amazon is more likely to be concerned than ebay by this
and ebay must now be thinking how clever they are to have introduced all the seller checks DSRs etc
as ebay has a fantastic advantage over the competition with them