Recently, several Russian sellers have accused the well-known US e-commerce platform Inspire Uplift of fraud, involving an outstanding payment amount of over 24.5 million rubles (approximately 1.8 million yuan).
A well-known e-commerce platform in the United States has gone bankrupt
Over the past two years, due to sanctions imposed by Amazon, Etsy and eBay on Russian sellers, many sellers have turned to Inspire Uplift, a platform that mainly sells handicrafts, personalized gifts and creative goods.
图源：直击跨境
However, starting from the spring of 2024, Inspire Uplift suddenly stopped paying for goods to Russian sellers. After October, the situation deteriorated further. The platform directly lost contact, and the seller accounts even faced the risk of being banned.
It is learned that the two founders of the platform, Aaron Wallace and Yasin Rahman, were also involved in extortion cases in US courts, further intensifying sellers' concerns about the reliability of the platform. As of early February 2025, the total amount of overdue payments had reached as high as 25 million rubles, causing heavy losses to the sellers.
Australian e-commerce companies suffered losses of over 350 million Australian dollarsRecently, Wesfarmers, the parent company of the well-known Australian e-commerce platform Catch, announced that it has suffered losses of over 350 million Australian dollars in the past three and a half years and will officially cease operations on April 30, 2025.
The Catch platform then sent a notice to the sellers, clearly stating that the end of April 2025 would be the official date for business closure, and January 31, 2025 would be the last sales date for the sellers on the platform. Starting from January 31st, the platform will stop accepting new product listings and buyer orders.
For any questions regarding store operation or platform-related matters, sellers are advised to contact the platform's customer manager in a timely manner, or to check relevant information through the platform's back-end system. They can also refer to the emails previously sent by the platform to the sellers for more assistance.
According to public information, Catch is one of the largest online retailers in Australia, and its website was officially launched in 2017. the predecessor of Catch.com was the well-known discount website catch of the day in Australia.
catch of the day was founded in 2006 by a pair of Australian brothers, Gabby Leibovich and Hezi Leibovich. After being impacted by e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay around 2016, it began to transform and was renamed Catch, and allowed third-party sellers to join.
According to the official announcement from Catch, nearly 200 jobs will be cut and 100 e-commerce positions will be transferred to Kmart to make use of Catch's warehouse after it closes in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025.
Years of huge losses cannot hide the decline
In fact, in recent years, Catch's financial situation has been deteriorating continuously: In 2022, Catch suffered a loss of 88 million Australian dollars; In 2023, the loss expanded to 163 million Australian dollars. In 2024, the loss still reached as high as 96 million Australian dollars.
Against the backdrop of the entire Wesfarmers Group's after-tax profit reaching as high as 2.6 billion Australian dollars, Catch's losses stand out particularly. In addition, Catch will report a pre-tax operating loss of approximately 40 million Australian dollars in the first half of the fiscal year 2024-2025.
Wesfarmers attributed Catch's financial predicament to the intensified competition in the online retail industry.
In recent years, the Australian e-commerce market has witnessed fierce competition from international giants such as Temu, Shein and Amazon. These rivals, leveraging their global scale and technological advantages, have offered more competitive prices and broader market coverage, continuously squeezing Catch's market share.
To deal with the predicament, Catch has also attempted to reverse the situation through means such as business recruitment. Especially in 2024, Catch made a big fuss about recruiting merchants, with a focus on Chinese sellers. However, due to the high entry threshold, only over 200 Chinese sellers have been attracted to join, which is far less than platforms like Amazon or Walmart.
In addition, some insiders have analyzed that the Catch platform is facing the challenge of high operating costs, especially focusing on logistics and supply chain management. The operation and maintenance of its fulfillment center, covering key links such as warehousing, logistics and technical support, all require a large amount of capital investment.
Meanwhile, Catch's logistics model has shortcomings in terms of efficiency and cost control. The distribution cost is significantly affected by various factors such as distance, method and scale, resulting in high logistics costs.
At the marketing level, despite the considerable advertising expenditure, it has failed to effectively promote sales growth, and the marketing investment is not proportional to the return. This imbalance between costs and benefits has further increased the financial burden on the platform, making it difficult for it to make profits in the fierce market competition.
