Want A Front Row Seat To Watch a Train Wreck?

[Vigilante]

I am calling it early. Buy.com will be dead by 2014. You heard it here first, folks.

Here are my two facts that lead to this conclusion.

1. Their answer to their crappy sales? Start charging their marketplace vendors quarterly subscription fees in addition to their sales commissions. Not fix their crappy sales --- charge their vendors to compensate for their crappy sales. Um...pass.

but 10x more importantly than that, they are

2. Dropping the Buy.com name and address. What could they have gone to that is more significant, impactful, and screams retail more than the domain name Buy.com, you ask?

Rakuten.com.

Ahahahahahaha.

a$$ clowns. Probably MBA's. 2014. Write it in pen. This once high flying company will be in the retail grave yard by 2014.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Translation: I'm happy to talk big, but not willing to actually back up my ridiculous statements with anything of value.

Got it. Thanks for confirming.

Now you can feel free to go back to bashing the branding decisions of guys who built a $13B company...sheesh...

Jason... I'm sorry bro, but your shit is getting old and frankly, I've had it.

Seriously, I don't give a shit how much "value" and great advice you bring to the real estate forum, or this forum. The problem with the value you deliver is it's constantly spiked with arsenic and shrouded in a "holier than thou attitude."

It's clear you've NEVER been wrong in your entire life. I'm sick of having to read it in my house.

Pretty much every thread outside of the RE board you comment in devolves into some internet war -- its obvious this forum is not for you. It's obvious you feel "Fastlane" is pretty much bunko BS. That's cool, not everyone agrees with the philosophy.

As far as I'm concerned, your 9 lives are up.

If you plan on being around here when you're eBook is made available for sale you might want to keep your incendiary comments to yourself and stay in the real estate forum... if you're still around by then, I'm sure many people will find your book valuable based on the solid advice you contribute on that board...

However I'm going to say this one time: If I have to kill another thread because you choose to play "internet hard a$$ that's never been wrong", you're done.

Thank you.

 

[Vigilante]

Actually, both the CEO and COO are attorneys.

Sigh. Here we go again.

Actually,

Chairman and CEO
Hiroshi Mikitani
Mr. Mikitani received his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Director and Vice President Executive Officer
Atsushi Kunishige
Mr. Kunishige received his MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CFO
Ken Takayama
Mr. Takayama holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Senior Executive Officer and Director
Kazunori Takeda
Mr. Takeda holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Senior Executive Officer and Director
Yoshihisa Yamada
Mr. Yamada holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Your Wikipedia search caused me to do three minutes worth of research to correct you that I will never get back.

 

[Vigilante]

I am in the business of predicting, and in some cases preventing --- train wrecks.

Over the past several years, a significant portion of my personal income has come in from studying retail to advise my clients how to "bet." I have been right on several, and wrong on a few. I haven't had the need to dig into Buy.com to that level, as I have no financial stake in their success or failure.

I advised my client to keep shipping Musicland. (Musicland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) We had an epic battle over strategy on whether or not to extend them terms. Within the window of concern, Musicland went under. Had the client blindly followed my advice, they would have lost their a$$. I was happy the day I called their CFO to eat some crow. So was he. He still laughs about it even today --- because we dodged a bullet. In this case, I bet wrong.

In the case of Circuit City (Circuit City - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) I bet correctly. I had a client pull a $100m credit line from them a few months before Circuit City's financial spiral that had them default on their vendors and ultimately file bankruptcy.

I don't win them all. My batting average is decent, but not perfect. To that end, I respect your opinion if :
1. You have insight that I don't, from an industry perspective
2. You have insight from a consumer perspective, or just a fast lane perspective as you get a glimpse of their strategy
and
3. You're not a jackass.

I am not familiar enough with the board of Rakuten to know whether or not they "grew a company to $13b." The guys that presided over the demise of Circuit City weren't the guys that "grew it" to that level... and nobody that extended them credit just sat back and marveled at how big their company was while they imploded. We don't have a horse in the Buy.com longevity since my clients don't extend them credit, and my own personal companies do nominal business on their marketplace. My interest is purely from being a student of retail.

$13b for an international retailer is not small, but not huge --- meaning by no stretch of the imagination are they "too big to fail." The number, from a retail perspective, isn't super impressive. Consider the company they are in - here's the top 20 retailers:

1 Wal-Mart US $US446,950
2 Carrefour France $US113,197
3 Tesco UK $US101,574
4 Metro Germany $US92,905
5 Kroger US $US90,374
6 Costco US $US88,915
7 Schwarz Germany $US87,841
8 Aldi Germany $US73,375
9 Walgreen US $US72,184
10 The Home Depot US $US70,395
11 Target Corporation US $US68,466
12 Groupe Auchan SA France $US60,515
13 Aeon Co, Ltd. Japan $US60,158
14 CVS Caremark Corp US $US59,599
15 Edeka Zentrale AG & Co. KG Germany $US59,460
16 Seven & i Holdings Co, Ltd Japan $US57,966
17 Woolworths Limited Australia $US54,614
18 Wesfarmers Limited Australia $US52,208
19 Rewe Combine Germany $US51,331
20 Best Buy Co, Inc US $US50,705

Best Buy is a $50b company and in a fight for relevance. 2013 and 2014 will be pivotal years in the survival and metamorphosis of several retailers. In my career, I have watched and chronicled the demise of dozens of retailers. The next few years will be fascinating to watch unfold in the retail business.

My guess is Buy.com will be added to that list by 2014. Could I be wrong? Yep. Am I interested in your opinions? Yep, if you have anything constructive to add. Market signs look bad. However, since I don't have a horse in the race... I won't drill down any further at this time, because being right or wrong on this speculation has no bearing on my 2013 or 2014 earnings.

I think their name change is ridiculous and will not be well received by customers, and I think their implementation of fees is a sign of a financial desperation. Time will tell if those external signs contribute to an implosion.

 

[Vigilante]

I don't get off on your hobby of getting in pissing matches on message boards.

Go engage someone that gives a shit about anything you have to say. I'm not one of them.

 

[Jonleehacker]

Personally I found Jscott's point of view on this thread refreshing, even if the bedside manner may need a little work.

As someone who has shot himself in the foot thinking I was smarter than someone (or some company) that was far more successful than me, I appreciated his point of view.

I think it is much more productive to figure out what benefit they perceive from their change in direction, and to assume that they if they are smart enough to grow a company to 13b, then we probably can learn more from them than predicting a trainwreck and hating on their MBAs.

 

[AgonI]

Nice, will be waiting for the day with 70% off their best selling products to resell them

 

[Kak]

They sure pissed away hundreds of millions in brand building over the years just to change the name to rabguptartfi.com

 

[AllenCrawley]

Why would I buy a Chevy

Have you seen the new 2014 Corvette Stingray? Oh my.

 

[theag]

Why the protectionist views? I guarantee that you own many things made in Japan. I am going to buy the best product for my money. Asian countries make better cars than the US for example. Why would I buy a Chevy when I can get a Toyota or Nissan?

That has nothing to do with throwing away the buy.com brand..

 

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[1PercentStreet]

 

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[AllenCrawley]

I'll pass.

Ok. I'll shoot video for you when I take it for a test drive :fastlane:





fftopic:

 

[andviv]

1. Their answer to their crappy sales? Start charging their marketplace vendors quarterly subscription fees in addition to their sales commissions. Not fix their crappy sales --- charge their vendors to compensate for their crappy sales. Um...pass.

Instead of focusing on the domain name issue, I rather focus on this aspect...

I wonder what makes them believe they can charge a subscription fee on top of their commission. It's akin to increase the rents to a shopping mall when less foot traffic is coming in.

Are they trying to get rid of smaller vendors and focusing on the bigger companies? Will this fee have a negative impact similar to what ebay suffered when they raised their fees to the sellers?

 

[1PercentStreet]

Am I the only one that has never heard of buy.com?
haha, this is literally the first time I've heard of them.

 

[Tommy92l]

Is there anyway to profit from this ?

 

[Vigilante]

To AgonI's point, eventually there will be a liquidation event. The buy.com domain name has serious equity, but that will probably be lost in the (eventual) bankruptcy to the largest debtor(s). However, when retailers start their death spiral, there will be inventory sold below cost for a while to try and meet finance demands.

 

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[Vigilante]

Asian countries make better cars than the US for example.

Finally, you and I have something to spar about. The mere fact that they make things cheaper does not mean that they make things better.

 

[Mike39]

Jason... I'm sorry bro, but your shit is getting old and frankly, I've had it.

Seriously, I don't give a shit how much "value" and great advice you bring to the real estate forum, or this forum. The problem with the value you deliver is it's constantly spiked with arsenic and shrouded in a "holier than thou attitude."

It's clear you've NEVER been wrong in your entire life. I'm sick of having to read it in my house.

Pretty much every thread outside of the RE board you comment in devolves into some internet war -- its obvious this forum is not for you. It's obvious you feel "Fastlane" is pretty much bunko BS. That's cool, not everyone agrees with the philosophy.

As far as I'm concerned, your 9 lives are up.

If you plan on being around here when you're eBook is made available for sale you might want to keep your incendiary comments to yourself and stay in the real estate forum... if you're still around by then, I'm sure many people will find your book valuable based on the solid advice you contribute on that board...

However I'm going to say this one time: If I have to kill another thread because you choose to play "internet hard a$$ that's never been wrong", you're done.

Thank you.

Translation:

 

[Vick]

 

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[howandwhy]

I do not know if it is coincidence. Since last three or four year, I used to buy regularly from buy.com. But I have stopped buying since one and half years (right exactly when rakuten started showing up in their front page header).
It is not because of Rakuten name though. I felt that they are no more beating prices compared to other online retailers.

 

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[JAJT]

Maybe I'm an odd consumer but I never considered Buy.com as a place to even look into buying from because to me it always sounded like a place trying to win business from luddites who think to themselves "Oh, I need to buy things, buy.com sounds like the right place!" A place trying to skim sales off the easiest and least educated consumer possible.

Not to say they were scammy; they were obviously a legit place of business, but that's they came off to me. With all my experience surfing the net, if something comes off as obvious as a hammer to the face I get a bit cautious.

Places like monoprice, amazon, etc... all SEEMED more reputable to me because it felt like they had to try a bit harder to build a reputation than going with something as generic and obvious as buy.com.

 

[nzerinto]

2. Dropping the Buy.com name and address. What could they have gone to that is more significant, impactful, and screams retail more than the domain name Buy.com, you ask?

Rakuten.com.

Seems quite a number of Japanese companies buying out major US firms recently....ie Softbank's purchase of Sprint is another example.
But you are right - not seeing the sense in this particular rebranding....

 

[AllenCrawley]

I'm surprised they waited this long to change the name. They bought them in 2010 ($250M). The article I read said the change of name is because they believe it is necessary "to establish the Japanese brand internationally". Hmmm... now are the getting rid of the buy.com name completely (selling it) or are they going to automatically forward to the new domain name. Nevertheless, it doesn't yet make sense.

 

[oddball]

Buy.com had an 8.07% growth rate in 2011, selling about $805 million. Not sure about 2012 numbers but they seem strong still.

 

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[AllenCrawley]

(Rakuten has purchased some of the largest online retailers around the world in recent years).

I'm curious about this so I'll look into some more but I wonder have any of them been as large as buy.com and did they also change the name of those?

 

[Vigilante]

I'm sure they will redirect the buy.com traffic to their new domain name, but the buy.com name will be mothballed.

Someone missed the fact that Americans would rather buy from buy.com than from a Japanese company that wants their Japanese brand to become important in the United States.

Buy.com was all about the domain name. Aside from that, their site isn't that great. Never has been. They just won the race to the domain registrar.

 

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[AllenCrawley]

Someone missed the fact that Americans would rather buy from buy.com than from a Japanese company that wants their Japanese brand to become important in the United States.

Buy.com was all about the domain name. Aside from that, their site isn't that great. Never has been. They just won the race to the domain registrar.

I've never been impressed with buy.com. Never bought anything from them.

 

[Vigilante]

They sure pissed away hundreds of millions in brand building over the years just to change the name to rabguptartfi.com


Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2

Lol true

 

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[theag]

Someone missed the fact that Americans would rather buy from buy.com than from a Japanese company that wants their Japanese brand to become important in the United States.

This. I mean, seriously, how can you make a decision like that? I'm not living in the U.S. so I never used or even thought about using buy.com, but from what I read here, in other articles, etc, they had it hard enough before this decision (competition vs amazon mainly). Really stupid.

We actually had a similar situation in Germany a few years ago where Rakuten bought a German company similar to buy.com and shortly after changed the name to rakuten.de. I don't remember the name of the company or how it all turned out, but will check it and report back.

Edit: It was called tradoria before so they didn't kill so much domain equity as with buy.com. They also renamed quickly after the takeover. Don't have time to research how the business developed compared to before the takeover, but I guess in the german case it actually improved.

Here's a infographic that kinda describes their philosophy pretty good:

 

[SeanKelly]

This. I mean, seriously, how can you make a decision like that? I'm not living in the U.S. so I never used or even thought about using buy.com, but from what I read here, in other articles, etc, they had it hard enough before this decision (competition vs amazon mainly). Really stupid.

We actually had a similar situation in Germany a few years ago where Rakuten bought a German company similar to buy.com and shortly after changed the name to rakuten.de. I don't remember the name of the company or how it all turned out, but will check it and report back.

Edit: It was called tradoria before so they didn't kill so much domain equity as with buy.com. They also renamed quickly after the takeover. Don't have time to research how the business developed compared to before the takeover, but I guess in the german case it actually improved.

Here's a infographic that kinda describes their philosophy pretty good:

View attachment 4495

This may prove to be an ignorant statement, but I'm not sure I'd like to empower Japan.