Wesfarmers today announced Catch will cease trading by the end of the financial year and Kmart will take over fulfilment centres
Interesting to see what they do with Catch mobile
https://www.wesfarmers.com.au/investor-centre/company-perfor…
Update: the Catch website homepage states that trading will cease as of 30 April 2025.
when their stuff used to actually be good
Once upon the time we used to have a script refreshing those one-deal-a-day sites — Zazz, Catch of the Day, etc.
I miss those days, they were the peak of Ozb and the special bargains. We hadnt experienced anything like that till then. All these one a day sales with the idea of having an item being sold for a cheaper than normal price when bought and sold in bulk.
Yep, then you had DealExtreme for the cheap overseas random stuff
@spackbace: Oh yeah! I loved DX back in the day, long before AliExpress was even the germ of an idea. I bought a ton of stuff from there.
Hahah, that would have been groundbreaking at the time
RIP Zazz and One-day/One-day Tee
RIP Zyzz
Zazz!
Catch Of The Day was pretty great in the early days. Yes it just copied Zazz which copied woot, and it didn't have the humorous writeups/forum/community presence Zazz did, but they pretty quickly surpassed them in quality of goods. I miss talking to other weirdos at midnight.
Still remember how shocking it was one day to see them jump from SD cards and bedding sets and random USB powered crap, to 52" Series 6 Samsung LCDs (back when Series 6 was the highest model, and 52" considered huge) for crazy cheap compared to JB Hifi.
and it didn't have the humorous writeups/forum/community presence Zazz did
And the steady stream of "goodnight" posts for each daily thread.
Someone should bring back this model. It can’t be a big company. Has to be a new startup
Yep. Good times.
No zazz for me tonight
remember when 'catch' was catchoftheday
Now it's "Find a catch in the piles and piles of junk"
catchoftheday is still head canon for me
We used to call it crapoftheday.
Still got my old eeepc that I got for $400 in 2009?
Felt amazing taking it on holidays back in the day
Yes and I remember when they had their special birthday deals with cheap wii's and stuff which always crashed their site, googling about that led me to find Ozbargain
I recently commented to a much younger colleague that I remember when it was just 1 deal per day and they were like 'wait what?'.
I worked there for 10 years. I left soon after Wesfarmers bought it. Wesfarmers/Kmart mishandled everything so poorly that it makes me wonder if it was intentional or just pure incompetence.
Probably both.. Worked for Dick Smith before and after the acquisition. They dropped the ball there. I reckon you'd still have some form of DS if they didn't own it.
Dropped the 'ol dick and ball
Ugh, I confused my Westfarmers with my Woolworths. I'm still on holidays…
You and me both!
You need to start AMA thread, lots of people would be interested. Especially if you are QQQ.
What is QQQ?
COTD sales representative at that time that posted on OzBargain frequently
No you are right. I watched Telstra buy a company called ooyala for 300 million and writing it off to zero.
They also bought the AltaVista search engine, rebadged as Go Eureka. That sank like a stone.
I miss AltaVista, it was ground breaking at the time, miles better than Yahoo and Excite.
Their webpage translation capabilities blew me away at the time.
eureka.com is a cracker name for a search engine.
Did you go down the slide?
If Wesfarmers didn't have Bunnings they'd be done.
They royally screwed the expansion of Bunnings to the UK, they didn't know how to manage Catch but Bunnings is so dominant it doesn't really matter what they do.
I think people are starting to wake up to Bunnings, their prices are pretty terrible for a lot of things, $30 for a gate hinge doesn't make any sense.
They already priced out most of the competition and only drop prices when something remotely related from Aldi is on sale… to what they should be sold for without the Gouging
me: oh wow, i got onepass now , i can finally justify getting stuff via catch too
also me: wow, i have not seen one deal that wasn't a discontinued/ random variant of something nobody wants/ was way cheaper elsewhere or direct through the supplier
There was an occasional good Lego deal from Target via Catch in recent times. But overall seems they gave up on the online bargain retail business model over 18 months ago and just became a Kmart and Target shipper.
Someone predicted that in the thread about companies likely closing in 2025….
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/16062242/redir
Catch. Seems like Catch, Kmart and Target all compete in a similar space. Probably would be better to consolidate them. I'd see Catch being merged into Kmart & Target
All hail our community manager @neil
Imagine all the high paid consultants that came up with that when they could have just checked OzBargain.
you need to start a mini newsletter or something
Do you have tonight's lotto numbers?
they should have paid you
@neil - you called it
I'm regularly getting catch deliveries in kmart boxes and vice-versa.
@jv: No, I'm refusing to use the contents and just wallowing here in my own suffering and self pity that I didn't get the shipping box I was expecting.
The thechnofeudalist illusion of choice.
With catch going down they're actually less technofeudal - Kmart and Target are old-school retailers with relatively steady product lines.
@neil ed it !!
All the shitty Catch products are now available on the websites of all the major stores now. it's really messed up product searches when all the overpriced Chinese crap now appears on Bunnings/Target/Kmart/etc.
I absolutely hate with a passion all the "market" products they have on all the shopping sites now (Bunnings, Target, Kmart, BigW, Woolies, etc.) like they think they're ebay or Amazon.
Why do they do that anyway? I've been wanting to ask someone "Why do these major retailers now allow 3rd party stores to sell on their websites?" and now since you brought it up I get to ask… lol.
It really pisses me off especially with Woolworths. I used to find electronics from Woolworths without issues until they started flooding their website with marketplace BS. Yes I'm aware they have a filter that just shows Woolworths items but holy [BEEP] I shouldn't have to filter out all the Marketplace BS every time I search for anything! Even the marketplace BS is starting to flood groceries… Coles being awesome not following the trend (I'm surprised).
I'm so sick of this Marketplace crap man… I've never purchased from a marketplace seller and I never will yet these websites try so hard to get you to do it. I wish there was an extension out there that auto hides this crap.
100%
I listened to a podcast with the Kogan founder and he said he added a marketplace and it just blew up his revenue. He had an existing customer base, popualr website, and so why not give their customers more choice, he thought.
It also looks very good on the balance sheet, as its just a minor technological cost, but the revenue jump is so great.
So yeah, all will do it. BigW does it (woolworths owned).
I dont mind it on kogan TBH.
But woolworths and bunnings it's just awful. Particularly woolworths how you have to hide it each time. Shouldnt be allowed for groceries.
Why do they do that? It's very simple: Because [redacted]loads of people buy it.
It's all well and good for us to sit here and whinge that "it's all overseas cheap crap", but all businesses are out to do one thing: make money. It's quite simple: If people weren't buying all this cheap crap, they wouldn't be doing it. You can't buy diamond encrusted whipper snippers at Bunnings because nobody wants one. But a bunch of cheap plastic bathroom accessories that are half the price of what they normally are? I'LL TAKE THREE.
These places are doing it because it expands their product range (which looks good on paper, and they can brag about how big their product range is) and they don't have to worry about the actual biggest cost: supply chain logistics.
They all want a clip of the ticket for doing nothing more than having a popular website. Easy money with very little investment
Man I can't even buy my GOD DAMN GROCERIES online without having to filter out / avoid the marketplace only items.
I'm making an order for delivery in 2 hours , I've already chosen my time window, marketplace is just inappropriate.
Thanks woolies
That said, if you hunt around across all these stupid markets you can save a bit of money. Needed a particular benchtop dishwasher, I ended up saving like $70 by buying it from woolies marketplace. The other day my girlfriend decided to punch out the clips that hold the microwave closed by accident, saved like $20 on a new microwave via catch (just an anko one) with some voucher that was floating around.
I've had quite a few instances like that tbh.
Speaking of Woolworths if you're someone like me that hates that marketplace crap someone posted a tampermonkey script that auto-hide that crap so you don't have to keep clicking that button anymore!
https://pastebin.com/raw/8UqBJCmf
(found from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1i678t7/aussie_r…)
Just tested it, works great.
thats handy as
Catch used to have genuinely good products. Then they decided to flood out all the good products with drop shipped/marketplace items that you could find everywhere else.
Pretty soon it became impossible to find anything, and you were better off looking elsewhere. Psychologically going to Catch you knew it was going to be an annoying experience.
Note to stores - Don't flood your site (looking at you Bunnings) with cheap marketplace items. It's a big waste of time for the customer and people get exhausted with scrolling through pages to find what they want.
Yep, if I want cheap junk I'll buy it from Temu, unless I want it within 9 weeks, in which case I'll just go to a real junk shop like kmart.
Cheap junk = Temu
Value items = Kmart
Branded Items = Amazon
Marketplace and markups = Catch
Kogan?
@abc: I put Catch and Kogan on the same level, probably Kogan worse since they have such horrible warranty support. Also not included in OnePass.
Kogan might be next, I'm not sure how they're not being eaten alive by the overlap from Temu/Amazon/Aliexpress.
Temu and Kmart is on the same level
Although catch wasn't the greatest, they were occasionally the cheapest and anything that reduces competition in the online market is not a good thing.
Competition is not being reduced though, they are effectively rebranding it to Kmart to mirror Big W Market / Everyday Market.
I would expect MyDeal (owned by Woolworths) to also get closed down to funnel traffic to the other two big-name marketplaces they run.
Competition is not being reduced though, they are effectively rebranding it to Kmart to mirror Big W Market / Everyday Market.
no, they're not being rebranded. It's being shut down completely.
Bought some cheap kids Asics and Nike shoes from them before but I can never be sure if they were genuine. Just like buying from Kogan.
Catch of the day, the original scam website and price jackers.
I used to check Catch Of The Day every day. Then they dropped the deals and it felt like a drop shipping site. Haven't bothered to visit for over six years now.
What pisses me off the most is that they have items on their website that's never in stock…. So when you search for something that you finally think is available you just find out it's been out of stock for years
Havent checked catch in few years.. it was full of rubbish and no real deals.
I miss the days of zazz, etc when they were genuine one-deal-a-day
MyDeal next year.
For real? It would be for the best. Too much negativity around that website.
One less for One Pass.
Most the cheap stuff on there doesn't qualify for the free shipping anyway, you have to buy the same product but for 4x the cost if you want the OnePass free shipping option.
You must be looking at the wrong items? Because from my end practically all the grocery items give the free delivery option with OnePass. I've never had this issue before and honestly this is the first time I'm hearing about this.
It was a slow death, they just lost their unique identity over time.
When will they have closing down sale discounts?
So…. OnePass price reduction? I mean, free shipping and Catch member pricing is a pretty significant part of that offer….
Guessing the half price promo they run is pretty generous already
RIP you were one of the sites of all time.
This could solve Kmart's issue of buying online. Currently they have to pick stock from shelves and most of the time they either can't find the stock due to the poor inventory system and shelves being trashed. Put a heap of Anko in the Catch warehouse and problem solved.
Not surprising anyway. Catch of the Day was awesome and once they shifted it went downhill.
Yep. Kmart's online ordering is a nightmare and quite frankly archaic in this day and age.
Yeah I hate their delivery system! To this day I still haven't figured out their same day delivery system! I've contacted Kmart but can't get a straight answer from those clowns.
One time I was gonna order their Egg Cooker and I wanted it same day delivered… I added the item to the cart and it didn't offer me that option BUT I then added a $1 candle to my cart and guess what? I was given the same day delivery option! just for giggles I added another candle and the option disappeared until I removed the candle and it came back! I freaking don't understand this system! Why can't it be like Big W's system that actually tells you on the item's page that it can be same day delivered!
Such an ancient system.
Last time I bought something off Kmart (cat litter), I got sent a bedside table. Then never sent the litter the second time.
They need it.
That seems like a good trade.
Wow! Bedside table over cat litter? How in the hell did they screw that up? I wish something like that would happen to me lol.
I believe recent Kmart online orders are actually processed by Catch warehouse in Moorebank (yes same area as Amazon's)
Wowsa - I still remember waiting up until midnight just to see what the next day's drop was