Want A Front Row Seat To Watch a Train Wreck?

[andviv]

I wonder if this is something they do with all of the sites they buy and not much thought goes into whether it will hurt more than help.

They are a pretty big corporation so i want to believe they have some numbers and metrics to go by, but as a producer/seller I don't see it as beneficial.

Maybe they want to weed out the smaller vendors, although not sure why.

 

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[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.

 

[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.

 

[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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[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.

 

[theag]

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

I think I heard first about them when Likwid (or Vig?) mentioned that they are on the site..

 

[1PercentStreet]

I think I heard first about them when Likwid (or Vig?) mentioned that they are on the site..

Wait... if they are discontinuing the buy.com name... then I guess I would have never heard of them haha.

No idea why they can't make Buy.com a brand. Can I buy it from them? Let me do the MJ and bring a once working site back!

 

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[Vick]

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

same with me.

 

[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.