Victor, Billy is an addict buyer. Once he got hooked he couldn't stop.
Now he's bought a new home with a mortgage...why yhoo couldn't have paid off that mortgage is beyond me.
Btw
Another I-retailer bites the dust.
>BOSTON (AP) - Toysmart.com is shutting down its online educational toy store after it failed to compete with bigger rivals on the Web including eToys and Toysrus.com.
Shoppers logging into the site, which Walt Disney Co. owns a majority stake, found a notice saying it was closed for inventory, but a spokeswoman confirmed Monday that the Waltham, Mass.-based company was ceasing operations.
``The online toy market is an incredibly competitive business that has some very strong players,'' said Michelle Bergman, a spokeswoman for Go.com, which oversees the Disney's Internet businesses. ``After careful review ... we concluded that ceasing operations and maximizing assets was the best course of action for Toysmart.com.''
Analysts say the demise of the company came as no surprise, given the huge growth over the last year in the online toy business.
``Toysmart.com never even came close,'' said Seema Williams, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. ``They didn't do anything wrong, but were just the wrong company selling the wrong product at the wrong time.''
And Toysmart hasn't been the only Web toy shop in trouble. Redrocket.com, run by Nickelodeon, shut down May 5. In recent weeks, KBToys.com laid off 30 percent of its staff and fired its CEO.
Toysmart.com CEO David Lord said most of the company's 120 employees were being let go this week, leaving only a small crew for as long as it takes to tie up loose ends.
``It's tough,'' said Lord, who described the mood Monday among employees as being ``like a set of roommates who were together through four years of college now going off to the four corners of the earth.''
He attributed Toysmart's demise in part to the financial markets and the competitive nature of the toy industry and e-commerce.
``You add all that up, and it's just too high a mountain to get over,'' Lord said.
Disney invested $20 million in the site last year and at the time pledged to provide another $25 million in Web and outside marketing campaigns. It holds a 60 percent stake in Toysmart and took over three of the five seats on Toysmart's board of directors.
The two companies' Web sites shared links, with Disney's Family.com site promoting Toysmart products and Toysmart's site gaining access to editorial content from Disney.
Toysmart sold about 75,000 items, ranging from educational toys and games to children's furniture.
``Simply limiting their inventory to good or educational toys is not enough for an online retailer anymore,'' Michael May, an analyst with Jupiter Communications in New York. ``What they need is to find a way to differentiate themselves from the others.''
Analysts said that Toysmart couldn't compete with larger rivals such as eToys, Amazon.com and Toysrus.com, which had a broader array of merchandise and large marketing and advertising budgets.
They also didn't develop a particular niche that could have wooed consumers as other smaller sites have done, May said.
Smarterkids.com, for instance, offers parents a chance to ``profile'' their children, to help decide precisely what toy, book or game would be appropriate for their age and educational abilities. It offers just 4,000 different items.
``If the smaller online retailers can't find a way to be meaningfully different, they're going to fail,'' said David Blohm, president and CEO of Smarterkids.com in Needham, Mass. ``Simply being smaller is not enough.'' |
