Whoever shopped at Abrakadabra, shopped! The most expensive Croatian webshop is shutting down

As a result of strategic changes and a focus on core activities, based on the long-term business direction of the Group, as explained to us at Fortenova, Abrakadabra, the largest investment in Croatian online retail to date, is shutting down. According to the official version at the time, Agrokor invested around six million euros in launching its webshop in 2016 (the unofficial version was several million euros higher), with the ambition to create one of the leading players in online retail in Southeast Europe in the long term.

On Abrakadabra’s website, customers were recently informed that the webshop would cease operations by the end of August, and the last day for making purchases at Abrakadabra was August 12. Since Abrakadabra was a store for non-food products, including technical goods, which are subject to the merchant’s obligation to issue warranties, customers were promised that customer support would take care of all issues related to warranties, complaints, and order deliveries, which will remain active for another two years.

Although it was launched with a plan to achieve sales revenue of around twenty million euros in its first year of operation, Abrakadabra never managed to come close to that amount. The very start of its operations was much weaker than expected, and then came Agrokor’s collapse, which, as it now appears, was also the beginning of its end. Fortenova’s company A007 Plus, the holder of the Abrakadabra brand, has seen revenues steadily grow over the past five years (from 1.3 million euros in 2019 to 5.3 million in 2023), but its annual losses have also steadily increased, exceeding two million euros last year.

If we understood Fortenova’s formulation that ‘Abrakadabra will take care of and be responsible for all its employees to whom continuity of employment has been ensured’, it should mean that its 26 employees will be redistributed within the Fortenova group.