Athleteshop ends its run

Dutch sports web shop Athleteshop has filed for bankruptcy, after an abysmal year in which strings of complaints led to all sorts of problems. Social media and review sites were flooded with customers complaining about late deliveries.

Issues with suppliers

Founder and former speed skater Yuri Solinger had called the first quarter “very poor”, but it went from bad to worse. After a series of complaints, which even made national television in consumer programme Kassa, DHL and PostNL even refused to deliver Athleteshop packages any more, local station RTV Noord said. Suppliers also stopped delivering to the web shop, which is said to have more than five million euros in debt. An investor was prepared to save the company if 85 % of suppliers would be ready to accept a delay in payments till 2019 (with the compensation of a certain interest), but not enough suppliers agreed.

At the end of last year, Athleteshop had opened a warehouse of 8000 sqm, its second warehouse in 2.5 years’ time: it is exactly that rapid growth that Solinger now blames for the demise of his company: “We are still growing fast and sometimes some things go wrong then”, he said a couple of weeks ago. Some 170 people worked in the company, which offered 150,000 products in fifteen countries.