<![CDATA[The expansion of Indonesia's e-commerce market has not by itself made vertical marketplaces viable. This study examines the failure of Renos Marketplace Indonesia, a home living and home improvement platform that began operating in June 2021 and shut down permanently on 25 January 2026, and examines it alongside the near-simultaneous closure of NocNoc, its affiliate in Thailand, as a parallel case. The study adopts an exploratory single-case design with document analysis, two-stage thematic coding, and source triangulation across academic literature, corporate disclosures, national business media, and market reports. Each reported failure factor is supported by at least two independent sources of different types. Seven interacting factors emerge: purchase frequency insufficient to amortise customer acquisition costs; weak repeat purchase; asymmetric competition from horizontal platforms that together held about 92 percent of Indonesian e-commerce GMV in 2025; the logistics of bulky goods; partial product-market fit in a high-involvement category whose buyers still inspect goods in person; reliance on a corporate sponsor without an independent path to profitability; and geographic concentration in Jakarta. Six sustainability strategies are proposed and illustrated with Indonesian home living platforms that adopted omnichannel and business-to-business revenue models. The study makes a conceptual contribution by arguing that failure in this segment stems less from managerial execution than from a structural mismatch between the characteristics of the product category and the architecture of the marketplace model.]]>
