Amazon to Shut Quidsi Unit After Failure to Find Profits – Bloomberg (Mar 29, 2017)

To be honest, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more cynical takes on the idea that Amazon would shut down a business for not being profitable enough, given how razor-thin Amazon’s own margins on its core e-commerce business have been for years. It’s also surprising that Amazon hasn’t been able to do to this Quidsi business what it’s done for its own business and for other acquisitions like Zappos over the last few years. Diapers.com feels like very much the same core value proposition as some of Amazon’s other properties – great selection, good curation and other features, and so on – and yet it hasn’t been successful despite having Amazon’s backing and presumably access to its logistics and other operations. It sounds like the team will be wrapped into Amazon’s other operations at this point and of course Amazon already sells all the same items through its own site, so there’s probably no big net loss here for Amazon, because much of the business will just be redirected there. But it’s an unusual failure for Amazon in the e-commerce space.

via Bloomberg


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