News - Play.com bought by Rakuten for £25 million

[HEXUS]

Japanese company extends its worldwide portfolio with acquisition of Play.com

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[llololloy]

£25m actually sounds a little low, thought play were huge.
Think this is why they restyled the site?

[llololloy]

oops, sorry, double post.

[Andeh13]

£25m actually sounds a little low, thought play were huge.

You and me both, I thought they were bigger then that as well... Hows that for successful marketing!

[Unique]

with all that stuff for a fiver the postie's gonna have a heart attack when he has to deliver £25m worth of stuff

[billybear]

A bargain if you ask me considering they bought a French ecommerce website for €200m.

Surely Play.com is second only to Amazon in the UK? The UK typically has a higher ecommerce penetration of any other EU country. Although the UK market is very cut throat with extremely tight margins which could bring the price down.

This is coming from someone who works in the multilingual SEO function.

[Jay]

wow that is cheap, maybe they where in trouble?

[TheAnimus]

I think they had issues when they closed that tax loop hole that was kinda their business model....

[Unique]

I think they had issues when they closed that tax loop hole that was kinda their business model....

what's that? afaik play didn't have any problems, no loopholes were closed, and as a proper jersey based company they didn't fall foul to jersey laws (they wanted to end companies having an office in jersey but not actually don't any real trading there, so taking advantage of tax breaks without contributing to jersey)

or did something else happen that i missed?

[cheesemp]

That does seem cheap but to be honest I think they've been struggling against amazon for a while now. I know most of my busness has switched that way.

I wonder if this means we'll see less of priceminister in the uk now or whether it'll be run more like the hut group (a series of different shop names but all with similar prices) and they'll still encourage both?

[crossy]

That does seem cheap but to be honest I think they've been struggling against amazon for a while now. I know most of my busness has switched that way.

I'd heard that too - that Amazon and HMV were making it "difficult" for them - but the real problem was the supermarkets. After all, Tesco/Asda/et al know how to do "cheap" and that seemed to be Play's big selling point.

Like you, a lot of the business I would have sent to Play is now heading to Amazon. Mainly on price, but also I can get loyalty points with Amazon, (although the deal with Nectar is better with Play, there you get 2pts:£1 whereas Amazon it's only 1pt:£1).

Also, is it just me, or have the number of "Play Exclusive" deals (special versions of games, extended albums, etc) fallen in the past couple of months. Plus I found it increasingly difficult to find stuff on their website - the presentation of goods definitely got worse imho.

This is coming from someone who works in the multilingual SEO function.

Ah, so it's your fault then!

[rs4847]

£25 mil is cheap.

Since Amazon started using HDNL and then even worse Hermes UK to deliver I've used them less and less and Play more.

Wonder if the data breach somehow affected them more than they let on?

[kelv_w]

I can't really find good deals on Play these days. Even some ipad2s were £60-£100 more expensive than highstreet prices but seemed to have gone back to the normal price lately.
I have a couple hundred quid accumulated through their points...still looking for a deal on their site.