Amazon China

» see amazon.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The page looked like amazon.com with the words swapped. Same column of departments down the left, same cart sitting in the same corner. That was the strategy and it was also the diagnosis, because the whole argument in Chinese e-commerce during those years was about the parts of shopping that are not the page.

Joyo.com started in Beijing in May 2000, founded by Lei Jun and Chen Nian, and by 2004 it was the largest online seller of books and music and video in the country. Amazon announced the purchase on 18 August 2004: roughly seventy-five million dollars, about seventy-two of it cash. Bezos called Joyo the leading online destination for those categories in China. Lei Jun, who stayed only briefly and went on to found Xiaomi, said Amazon's global expertise combined with the Joyo team would move the whole market forward.

It did not. The site ran as Joyo Amazon for seven years, took the amazon.cn address in October 2011, and lost share the entire time. Estimates put it near fifteen percent of the market around 2011, and under one percent by the time it closed. Amazon announced the wind-down on 18 April 2019 and stopped domestic third-party selling on 18 July, keeping the cross-border import store and the AWS business.

I have no memory of this to offer, which is the honest position on almost anything that happened inside the Chinese internet from Ankara. What is familiar is the shape rather than the site. A foreign platform buys the local leader, keeps the local name in front for a few years, then quietly replaces it with the parent's product and loses to the competitor that never left. Turkey ran the same sequence with eBay and GittiGidiyor, on a smaller stage and with a slower ending.

~ the record ~

~ the bookstore underneath ~

Joyo was not a general store when Amazon bought it. The 2004 press release lists books and video first, then software and toys further down, which is roughly the order Amazon itself had grown in, seven years behind. Buying it was the cheap version of a decade of work, and on paper it was the correct move.

What came with the purchase was a warehouse footprint and a customer base that had been trained on Chinese retail expectations, and what got applied on top of it was a playbook written for a market where the mail worked and the credit card was the default. Cash on delivery was normal in China, so was a shopper who negotiates in a chat window before buying, and neither was in the playbook.

~ the fifteen percent ~

The share number is the whole story compressed into one figure. Around fifteen percent in 2011 was not a small position, and it was lost over eight years to two companies making opposite bets. Alibaba built a marketplace where it owned no inventory and took a cut, then invented Singles Day out of nothing and turned one November date into the largest shopping event on earth. JD.com built warehouses and its own delivery staff and competed on the thing Amazon usually competes on.

Amazon China did neither at scale. Decisions ran through Seattle, product changes came out of a global roadmap, and the local team could not move the pricing or the promotions fast enough to be in the fight during the weeks that decided the year. By 2018 the answer to why anybody would buy a domestic product from amazon.cn instead of Tmall had no content in it.

~ the shell that stayed ~

The domain never stopped resolving, which is why this one is easy to misread. What sits at amazon.cn is the import channel: overseas goods shipped in from abroad, with no domestic marketplace under it. In January 2024 the desktop version stopped offering shopping at all and the whole thing moved to the app and a WeChat mini program, and Prime in China ended in the same window.

A live 200 on that address means an import storefront answering, not a marketplace. The business that was bought in 2004 and carried the Joyo name in its logo until 2011 is not there in any form. Amazon's own framing at the time was that the China commitment remained strong, phrased carefully enough that both readings survive.

~ the kindle ending ~

Kindle was the piece that outlasted the marketplace and it went the same way. Amazon announced on 2 June 2022 that it was leaving the Chinese e-book business, stopped supplying devices to Chinese retailers, and closed the store on 30 June 2023. Books already bought stayed downloadable for a further year.

That leaves the cross-border storefront and the cloud business as what remains of nineteen years. Amazon left the largest consumer market in the world twice inside four years, and in both cases the exit was announced as a change of emphasis rather than a defeat.

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