If you have been using Amazon.com’s e-commerce platform, Webstore, you likely received a notification from the online retailer that they will be discontinuing this service. It was used by small to mid-sized merchants for years, but effective July of 2016, it will be entirely shut down. This does give merchants a considerable amount of time to make other arrangements, but it may still be difficult since Amazon is the ideal place for many companies to do their business.
Just to make sure it is clear, this does not mean that people can’t sell their products through Amazon. This is one specific product that they offered to merchants. The total number of businesses using this service is not known at this point, but it is likely a very small percentage of the total number of people selling through Amazon in any way.
In the letter sent to users from Amazon it was said, “We are writing to let you know that, effective July 1, 2016, we will discontinue the Amazon Webstore service. Your ability to sell on Amazon.com and your Selling on Amazon account will not be impacted by this change.” It went on to say, “We realize your own website is important to your business. We will support the Webstore service until July 1, 2016 to give you 15 months to prepare for the change.”
The service itself was effectively a website that was hosted by Amazon to help small companies engage in e-commerce more easily. While this will cause inconvenience for many companies, there are a lot of other tools that will allow them to put up more traditional sites without too much trouble.
From a marketing point of view, it did surprise me that Amazon made this move. It seems that it was a service that did not take any significant resources from their company and helped bring in additional revenue. Of course, I don’t have access to all the back end data, so presumably there were more factors involved with the decision.
