Von Marcel Weiß und Jochen Krisch
Am 11. September wird Zlio eingestellt, einst ein Exciting Commerce Liebling und zuletzt ein Schatten seiner selbst.
Zlio war eine Plattform für das Empfehlen von Produkten und das "Erstellen eigener Shops" für die Nutzer, die auf diese Weise über verschiedene Wege mitverdienen konnten.
Anfangs agierte Zlio sehr nutzerorientiert und kam - im Vergleich zu anderen - sehr gut voran. Doch je mehr man in alte Verhaltensmuster verfiel und Google als seine Hauptüberlebensquelle betrachtete, um so schwieriger wurde es für das Startup.
Bereits 2009 ging es nach einer weiteren Anpassung des Geschäftsmodells bergab:
"Für ein Zlio aber, das sich auf die Fahnen geschrieben hat, seine Nutzer quasi reich zu machen, ist ein Freemium-Modell natürlich fatal.
Man kann sich ausrechnen, was passiert, wenn die Masse der Nutzer das Gefühl hat, mit einer minderwertigen (Basis-)Version abgespeist zu werden, während es die optimale Version nur gegen Aufpreis gibt.
Das kann man machen, wenn man konkurrenzlos gut ist. Aber nicht, wenn Amazon ein mindestens so gutes Angebot kostenfrei anbietet, das sich zwar auf das Amazon-Sortiment beschränkt, aber inzwischen sogar von Händlern wie Reno genutzt wird."
Die Vorwürfe des Managements, wer oder was für das Ende von Zlio verantwortlich ist, sind eine Geschichte für sich:
"In an email to users to inform them of the service’s impending shutdown, fingers were pointed all around, not only at Google, but also at an undisclosed SEO company who failed to improve the site’s rankings in Google’s search results."
Das vollständige E-Mail zur Schließung gibts im Nachklapp:
"ALERT : Zlio is Closing Its Doors
Six years after its launch, we regret to announce that we are going out of business.
The service will officially end on September 11!
Zlio had a fantastic start, receiving capital from one Europe's largest venture capital funds, Mangrove Capital. In addition, we held advanced M&A talks with Google, which unfortunately fell through at the last minute.
Our strong initial growth was interrupted on September 27, 2007, when the majority of Zlio shops, which were generally very well ranked, saw their Google ranking drop dramatically, eliminating 65% of our traffic.
Despite our best efforts, and the opening of 380,000 stores to date, it has not been possible to regain our previous Google rankings, except in exceptional cases.
When we founded Zlio, we thought that you, members of Zlio, would successfully promote your shops among your circles. We did not believe that Google referencing would be so crucial. Unfortunately, it has proved to be indispensable.
Among the actions taken to improve our Google ranking, we approached an SEO company who claimed they were able to fix our problem.
In view of their poor performance, we assessed that this company had not fulfilled its obligations. Therefore, we entered into dispute with it, which resulted in a court case whose sentence was rendered on July 26, 2011. This ruling is available on the website of the Paris Commercial Court (Tribunal de Commerce de Paris).
This decision sentences us both to pay the whole of a service that we still believe have not been provided and to pay damages for publishing our opinion about Referencement on Twitter. The latter part of the sentence has already drawn much attention in the French media.
This sentence means we cannot go on. The service has been losing money for several years (which forced us to gradually reduce our staff), and the amounts to which we are sentenced to pay today no longer allow us to meet our obligations.
Nevertheless:
- We will settle all the commissions due to our members. If you have validated commissions, you are invited to collect them as soon as possible via your administration interface.
Click here to go to your administration interface : http://digiframes.zlio.net/admin/index.php?page=Commissions
If you have pending commissions, you will be able to collect them within the next few weeks as the merchants validate them.
- The Premium subscriptions that will still be active on September 11 will be reimbursed automatically in the next few days as Zlio commissions prorata their remaining months of subscriptions.
The shops will close on September 11.
The owners of active domain names registered through our service will soon receive an email with the information required to transfer their domain name to another website.
Thank you all for your trust!
We are proud to have invented such an innovative tool, but it soon became clear that our success was too dependent on search engine optimization, which we did anticipate.
Thank you all for your support, and see you soon!
The Zlio Team"
Frühere Beiträge zum Thema:
- Social Commerce: Wie sich Zlio selber das Wasser abgräbt
- Social Commerce: Zlio startet Marktplatz für Händler und Lieferanten
- Social Commerce: Zlio Umsätze und Kennzahlen für 2007
- Zlio nimmt Lukasz Gadowski und Oliver Jung an Bord
- Zlio sichert sich 4 Mio. Dollar Venture Capital
- Zlio stellt die nächste Generation seiner Zlioshops vor
- Zlio ersetzt Amazon und testet AdSense als dritte Erlösquelle
- Amazon boykottiert Zlio in den USA
- Exciting Commerce Stars 2006 - Die Innovationstreiber International
- Zlio Buzz Shopping
das video / http://ecommerce.typepad.com/exciting_ecommerce/2007/06/zliogrnder_jere.html / ist leider nicht mehr live, aber lemeur hat dort eines meiner lieblingszitate angebracht ;) "So you can create a shop, and you can sell everything you want, and you make 50 cent a month."
Kommentiert von: markus | 26. August 11 um 16:12 Uhr