b2bgifts.ru — the website of the Nizhny Novgorod company "Otkrytie" (Opening), which traded in business gifts and promotional souvenirs with logo application. It operated from 2004 to 2016: at first as a showcase site for a firm with showrooms in Nizhny Novgorod[1], and in its final years as an online store with a shopping cart and a catalogue[2].

The 2004 site

The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 26 July 2004. The page heading read "Souvenir products 'Otkrytie'"; the menu consisted of the sections "About the company", "News", "Products", "Logo application", "Catalogues", "Brands", "For Ad Agencies", "Design", "Showrooms", "Clients", "Vacancies", "Contacts" and "Site map"; there was also a site search[1]. The "For Ad Agencies" section — addressed to advertising agencies — shows that the company worked not only with end customers but also with intermediaries.

The news feed on the same page preserved several stories from the summer of 2004. The first entry was "Our site has opened": "Our site is now up and running! We hope it will make the ordering procedure easier for you," as the home page announced. The second reported that in June a "new, refitted 'Otkrytie' showroom" with expanded retail space would open in the Etazhi (Floors) shopping centre. The third opened the New Year season: orders were being taken for Christmas balls and bells with symbols applied "by the spraying method", and orders were accepted only until 1 September 2004. The fourth promised every visitor to the site a 5% discount throughout July[1].

The footer of the page carried the address and telephone: Nizhny Novgorod, 20 Rozhdestvenskaya Street, telephone (8312) 34-40-68, email info@b2bgifts.ru[1]. A separate button offered to "download catalogues"[1] — in those years the suppliers' paper catalogues remained the main sales tool for souvenir products, and the site worked as an appendix to them rather than as a replacement.

Online store: the move to Dunaeva Street

By the mid-2010s the site had turned into a full-fledged store. The snapshot of 1 August 2015 shows a header with the telephone +7 (831) 419-83-20, "register" and "log in" links and a cart counter ("0 items in cart"), while the menu had grown shorter and more commercial: "About the company", "Catalogue", "Logo application", "Portfolio", "Gift shop", "Blog", "Contacts"[2]. On display were a "USB hub with a clock" and a "USB 3 in 1" set — a mains charger — while a separate block was given over to corporate daily planners, weekly planners, desk planners, notebooks, business card holders and organisers[2].

There, too, the company described itself: "The Otkrytie company, since its founding in 1997," has specialised "in the supply and manufacture of promotional souvenirs and business gifts", offering products "from stock in Russia and to order from Europe and Asia", as the home page stated. The firm called itself the general representative of the "Proekt 111" (Project 111) catalogue; the phrase about its status as official representative of "Galereya Elitnykh Podarkov" (Gallery of Elite Gifts) breaks off in the surviving text[2]. The year of foundation — 1997 — was stated by the site itself; the domain, however, appeared in the web archive only in 2004[1], and the copyright line in the footer was counted from 2005[2].

The address changed as well: instead of 20 Rozhdestvenskaya Street, the contacts give Nizhny Novgorod, 8 Dunaeva Street; telephone and fax were a single number, +7 (831) 419-83-20, and the email was unchanged, info@b2bgifts.ru[3]. Beside it stood a "view on the map" link[3].

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site entered our survey of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet through the materials of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004: it is listed among the entrants of the city competition in the very year it opened. No votes are recorded for it in the surviving voting results[4]. Nor is any position in Counter.nn.ru on record: the site is absent from the slice of the rating on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating was based. This is the typical profile of a corporate showcase: such sites lived not on traffic but on calls to the telephone number in the footer, and they were usually lost in the regional traffic counters.

How it closed

The web archive preserved 48 captures of the home page; the last of them is dated 25 October 2016. The last snapshot with readable content is that of 10 January 2016, and it repeats the 2015 page almost word for word: the same telephone, the same address on Dunaeva Street, the same unfinished phrase about "Galereya Elitnykh Podarkov" and the same "2005–2015" copyright[3]. Judging by this, the site stopped being updated before it disappeared.

A liveness probe of the domain found no working site at b2bgifts.ru: the address is listed as dead, and no move to another domain is recorded in our data. Twelve years in the history of a Nizhny Novgorod souvenir firm — from a showroom in Etazhi and Christmas bells with sprayed-on emblems to USB hubs with clocks — have survived only in web archive snapshots.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2015 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)