Play.com to Cease Retail Trading

i used them at xmas ;)

i used to spend thousands a year with them though. but since raku****e bought them its been going down hill. even the search feature is crap these days

i bought all my mp3s from there too. think i will redownload them all again just in case!
 
Shame for the staff if it is true, but then no surprise really as they're the PCWorld of the camera world.


As for Play, well they have been going down the swanee for a number of years now.
 
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InertProtocol said:
And now Jessops appears to be entering administration...
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That's what you get when you charge £60 for a 16GB SD card. OcUK price is <£10.

These companies are not competitive, they survived by preying on consumers that weren't savvy enough to know better. They did not provide any genuine competition to the online retail giants like Amazon or eBay. If they did, they'd still be trading.
 
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Theophany said:
That's what you get when you charge £60 for a 16GB SD card. OcUK price is ~£20.

These companies are not competitive, they survived by preying on consumers that weren't savvy enough to know better. They did not provide any genuine competition to the online retail giants like Amazon or eBay. If they did, they'd still be trading.
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i guess its hard to complete with large companies that dont pay tax?

we need to be careful else all the smaller companies will close then expect amazon etc to whack up the prices and fees for sellers
 
realBabelfish said:
i guess its hard to complete with large companies that dont pay tax?

we need to be careful else all the smaller companies will close then expect amazon etc to whack up the prices and fees for sellers
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Play and HMV are no strangers to tax loopholes. Both are based in the Channel Islands. Or is this a debate about the degrees of crookedness?
 
physichull said:
So its going to turn into an Amazon Marketplace type site then?
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They already operate like this don't they?


waynesalmon said:
Amazon may swallow Rakuten and in turn be swallowed by Ebay who own half the galaxy already .
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I thought Amazon still dominate with ebay second.

Plus if anyone is going to take over it would be Alibaba.

edite: as for Jessops my, and others I know, experience of them and their staff always left me wondering how they lasted as long as they did.
 
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Good, its been 5-6 years since I ordered anything off play.

They stopped being cheaper for cd's and dvd's a long time ago which was their primary market. Everything else was just there for impulse buying which became their main profit margin. As soon as that becomes the business model this is what is going to happen.

Oh and Jessops deserve it too. Far too much time and money wasted on employing idiots and charging far far too much for film. I am all for shops employing specialists/enthusiasts in what they sell, but just picking pompous and arrogant fools who categorically deny anything but what they are a fanboy of is just moronic (been into one that has denied any existence of film printing because he couldn't be bothered to do it amongst other mad problems). The less places that are run like this the better the world will eventually be.
 
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InertProtocol said:
And now Jessops appears to be entering administration...
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You don't know how relieved I am at this happening now and not earlier, I ordered and paid upfront for a high end lens from them (8k) that wasn't going to arrive until mid Jan, but out of the blue arrived directly from Canon Netherlands on Christmas Eve thankfully!

Won't be getting my few hundred quid topcashback then which is one of the reasons I bought from them!
 
I used to use Play many years ago before Amazon became the one-stop-shop for most things. I now have Prime and usually only buy from Amazon direct or merchants using Amazon's packing and delivery service.
 
jon86 said:
I used to use Play many years ago before Amazon became the one-stop-shop for most things. I now have Prime and usually only buy from Amazon direct or merchants using Amazon's packing and delivery service.
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Same, Amazon is my number one place to shop on/offline, I spend too much a year there, but we tend to buy anything from household items to food to blurays to electronics.

The one thing I love it makes shopping amongst probably 100,000s of items so easy, and their customer service is pretty much the best I have ever experienced.
 
About 6 months ago, a friend of mine who works for them pointed me towards a job in their Bristol office. Dodged a bullet there!
 
This has been known for a while. Their marketplace is already bigger than their own direct retail and has been for about a year.

MrMarvelous said:
For the people worried about competition and Amazon, won't e-tailers be competing against other e-tailers on there?
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Yep, plenty of pretty big online retailers already use Playtrade, in the same way as eBay.
 
I've been hearing for ages about HMV going under so wasn't expecting them to outlast Play, Play being the retailer I still buy all my Blu Rays and Games from.

Given the amount of exclusive Steelbooks they sold last year this news sucks for me, I guess with HMV still presumably on their last legs Amazon will take over everything?
 
Seeing as people keep asking, for games, shopto are pretty good (many prefer it to amazon for things like pre-orders).
 
**** I have a credit card that gives me play points and about £30 worth of vouchers. Time to spend the vouchers and jump ship!
 
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