Rakuten closes France's No.1 e-commerce site PriceMinister 16 years after €200M takeover

PriceMinister, founded in 2000 by Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, was a pioneer of French e-commerce. When Japan's Rakuten announced its takeover in June 2010, the site was the No. 1 online shopping destination in France: over 11 million monthly users, some 12 million members, more than 100,000 active sellers and 160 million product listings. Rakuten paid roughly €200 million ($250 million) — a decidedly unstingy price, as The New York Times put it, for a business with barely €50 million in revenue. It was Rakuten's first big step into the European market.

The lead did not survive contact with the market. In 2016 Rakuten wrote the acquisition down by €135 million, cutting its value from €200 million to around €65 million. The site was rebranded from PriceMinister to Rakuten France in 2018 and the original brand was abandoned, but the business never withstood the competitive shock from American and Chinese giants. Over the following decade the number of active customers fell 33% and web traffic 42%; by the third quarter of 2025 the site drew just 9.5 million unique visitors a month, according to the Fevad–Médiamétrie barometer.

The end came quickly. On April 7, 2026, employee representatives were told of a project to sell the site — or close it by autumn if no buyer appeared. Interested parties reportedly included the founder Kosciusko-Morizet, who was preparing a buyback bid with investment fund Verdoso and former Rakuten France boss Fabien Versavau, and other names were mentioned: Casino, Carrefour, Pixmania and Back Market. Only two firm offers materialised, from Pixmania and a foreign investment fund — and neither convinced the management nor the CSE.

On July 16, 2026, Rakuten France announced the marketplace would close definitively by the end of the year. The 180 employees face a plan social submitted to the labour authorities for validation. Sixteen years after Rakuten bought the pioneer of online sales for €200 million, it was shutting it down.