Atomic Mall Goes Dark: Has This One Time eBay Alternative Closed Up Shop?
Atomic Mall launched in 2008, positioning itself as an alternative to growing corporatization of eBay at the time with a promise of being "a throwback to the early days of online commerce, when corporate interests didn't interfere with the ability of small merchants to grow their operations, and freely trade with each other."
But as eBay is getting ready to celebrate its 30 year anniversary this year, Atomic Mall appears to have recently gone dark, leaving both buyers and sellers wondering what happened to the marketplace - including one Value Added Resource reader who says they just noticed the website is longer available just in the last few weeks.
In researching the current status of Atomic Mall, I've been unable to find any record of public communication about shutting down, it appears the site has simply been shut down with no explicit notice to users.
The internet archive shows the Atomic Mall homepage was last saved in mid-December 2024, at which time it was still active and looking to recruit new sellers.
Review sites like TrustPilot also show activity for Atomic Mall seems to have died down toward the end of 2024 - and almost all of the social media profiles that were featured on the site's Info page as of December 2024 have also now been deleted.
The exception is a YouTube Channel which is still a live profile, though the most recent upload was four year ago, and a Pinterest profile which appears to have last posted about four months ago.
Interestingly, it appears there is currently a split between the www and non-www versions of the atomicmall.com site.
Site owner typically pick whether to default to using a url that still shows the www. in front of the domain name and they'll have their DNS settings set up to then forward the non-www version to www or vice versa.
But that doesn't appear to be what is currently happening with Atomic Mall - instead, the www version of the site simply doesn't load in multiple browsers that I've tested.
But the non-www version does still load - however, it appears to a previous template of how the site appeared around 2013.
This screenshot of the homepage taken on August 3, 2025.
And for comparison, here's what the internet archive shows the site looked like in August 2013:
Also, many of the links on the currently active non-www version of the site direct to archived pages, not active live pages on the atomicmall.com domain.
WhoIs records for the AtomicMall.com domain are mostly private, but it does show there was an update on January 25th, 2025.
All of these oddities and discrepancies could mean that the site suffered some kind of technical problem or hacking that the owners have not yet recovered from, which could explain why it appears to be using an older archived backup version of the site.
It's also possible the site could have been taken over by bad actors and may be using the site as a way to harvest personal ID and credit card information, similar to some of the fake websites that scrape listing data from eBay and other marketplaces for that purpose.
Liz Morton
Attempts to contact Atomic Mall through multiple official email address all resulted in an address not found error saying "address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail" so as of time of publishing I have been unable to confirm the current status of the business.
Users are advised not to visit the site and if you do, definitely don't enter any log in credentials or personal or financial information for security reasons.
If you're a former Atomic Mall buyer, seller or employee or have any information about the current status of the site, let us know in the comments below or contact VAR!
