John Lewis to can buy.com

Never knowingly undersold British retailer John Lewis is to close Buy.com in the UK after experiencing a bumper Christmas in its own Web site.

The department store's site - Johnlewis.com - took 1,000 orders a day in the run up to Christmas and on the back of this success feels there is little point running Johnlewis.com and Buy.com in parallel.

Murray Hennessy, MD of John Lewis' ecommerce operation, told the FT: "We have taken the decision to merge the two businesses to capitalise on the strength of the John Lewis brand name after we saw the strength it had for us in the run-up to Christmas."

John Lewis bought the UK arm of computer etailer, Buy.com, in February last year for $4m (£2.9m). Since then it has been an entirely separate operation from Buy.com in the US, which remains open for business.

However, a spokeswoman for the company denied that closing the business a year after acquiring it was a waste of money.

"Absolutely not," she said.

"The company bought it for its technology and its people to turbo-charge the Internet offering of John Lewis."

John Lewis' Buy.com offers 15,000 different IT products on its site although this will be slashed to around 2,000 when it's merged in March with the "homey" products more associated with John Lewis. ®

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