By LI Xinting
The Eachnet website, one of the earliest e-commerce platforms in the country, will cease operation on August 12, the company has said in a statement released on its official website.
The out-of-date layout of the website perhaps tells part of the story itself, and many millennials will be surprised the site is still there. And for those Very Online types born after the year 2000, well, they have probably never even heard of it.
In August 1999, SHAO Yibo and TAN Haiyin founded Eachnet in a two-room apartment in Shanghai. More than 40,000 people signed up within two months after the site launched, about 1 percent of all netizens in China at the time.
Within a year, it became China's largest online shopping community, attracting VCs like IDG Capital, Springhill Fund, and Orchid Asia, and closed three financial rounds in two years.
In the early 2000s, when there was an order, the buyers had to go to banks or post offices to wire money to sellers on Eachnet.
In 2002, eBay, the largest e-commerce site at the time, injected US$30 million (then around 240 million yuan) into Eachnet and gobbled up the rest of the company with US$150 million the next year.
It was a glorious moment and the turning point for Eachnet; Alibaba founded Taobao.com the same year.
By 2006, Eachnet owned only 29 percent of the e-commerce market, while the late bloomer Taobao took the rest. But by 2012, Taobao stood firmly on top with 95 percent of the market. Eachnet had a negligible 0.01 percent.
Eachnet tried to fight back and started its daigou service – for domestic shoppers who buy foreign products overseas – in 2010, but it didn’t work out, and as of next month, the website shall be no more.
