Buy.com Sold For $250 Million
2010 May 20
According to TechCrunch.com, Buy.com was purchase for $250 million dollars by a Japanese e-commerce company, Rakuten.
The deal is all cash
Rakuten in Japan counts 64 million members, while Buy.com claims 14 million customers.
Seems like a pretty cheap price for one of the most recognizable brands on the net and 14 million customers.
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This seems incredibly odd. Wouldn’t a competitor in the space such as BestBuy with a market cap of 17 billion be in the mix offering more, pushing up the bid? Or Amazon, with an internet profit margin higher than any competitor’s market cap?
At the very least, the number of internet users visiting Buy when intending to visit Bestbuy must be worth some vast amount to BBY which they have clearly passed on.
Deal of the century imho.
Wow, seems like a deal.
I mean, I don’t have $250mil, but that seems like quite a business for the amount.
However, they don’t advertise like they used too… I haven’t heard from them in a while.
Maybe business is slipping.
Aron
Glad to see foreign investors still interested in our markets, retail and otherwise. Occurs to me too that buying into a well-established online retailer with a brand, Buy.com, is very different from building something new from the ground up.
Sounds like a good deal. I believe Buy.com drop ships everything. Maybe they were in jeopardy of losing a key distributor. I always find it odd when a business puts competitor ads on their website to gain click or affiliate revenue.
I’ve changed my mind.
$250 MILLION is a lot of money.
14 million customers equals a valuation of around $18 per customer.
That’s a fair figure, isn’ it ?
TAKEN ONLINE:
Bebo sold to AOL a few years back for $850 million and had about 40 million users, costing $21.25 per user.
In July 2005, News Corp. purchased the parent of MySpace for $580 million.
At the time, MySpace had about 21 million users, costing $27.62 per user.
These are USERS… Buy.com has actual paying customers… so they have to be worth more than $18 each.
It’s a good buy for sure, but $250million is a big chunk of coin to spend to jump into the USA market for the Japan-based Rakuten.
Aron
I wonder what they will do with company now… They went public years ago, then went private. Probably will go public again. Then wait 3 years and go private.
Rakuten is massive. At this point $250 million is small change to them, and they have expanded about all they can in Japan without opening brick and mortar shops. I’m sure they’ve been looking to expand into the US, and it sounds like they found a relatively cheap entry point.
The nearest equivalent to Rakuten in the USA is Amazon – except last time I looked, Rakuten was maintaining the email lists for all the shops using its system. Imagine Amazon collecting the customer lists of all of its sellers! On top of that, Rakuten is heavily used by real-word businesses, rather than just online businesses.
It will be interesting to watch how they play this.
Unless they get struck in the Japanese mindset that kills so many overseas Japanese ventures, they should give Amazon retail a serious run for the money.
I think Rakuten owns Linkshare as well? – Very big company.
Fair Price…
Not all Traffic is the
same (as we all know)
A USER can be a BUYER…
A BUYER ** is ** a BUYER…
No guarantee on USER=$$
Buyer $$=A Given
Trick is to learn the best
cheese to lure the Buyer IN…
Back to work I go…
Working on a Chess
(games-community-news-sms)
project…
Have a great weekend…
~Patricia Kaehler – DomainBELL
$250 million is nice money and I am happy to see that sale. The prices are at hike and it is good for domainers… It is worth sale.. Market is rising again…
Hello Mike,
I could not agree with you more! The verb BUY is a powerful marketing tool and this 250 mill$ price tag will look super cheap 5 years from now. All action verbs tied to a category killer are the mere definition of a premium .com Address.
Gratefully,
Jeff
I don’t care for Buy.com anymore. it’s not the same website. I know this thread is old but I just don’t see the deals at buy.com that used to be there and their email/ads are unexciting. I MUCH prefer Newegg and Amazon these days