Amazon Explore

» see amazon.com/explore as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

amazon explore was one of those products that only made sense inside a very specific window. in march 2020 nobody was flying anywhere. amazon shipped an internal experiment where you booked a live video call with a guide somewhere in the world and walked around a market or a museum through their phone camera. it launched in the us in late 2020 while the rest of the amazon catalog was busy shipping toilet paper.

i never used it. it was us-only for the whole two-year run. the checkout page even required a us billing address. from ankara i read the launch coverage in the tech press and moved on. a friend on a us prime account described one session where a guide in tokyo walked through a stationery shop, held things up to the phone, and answered questions in real time. the tour cost about 40 dollars and lasted an hour. that was the shape of the product.

the pricing had a real range. a short session with a costa rican animal sanctuary was around 7 dollars and 50 cents. a longer walking tour through a market in venice was closer to 50. some sessions had a shopping angle where the guide would buy an item on your behalf and ship it to your prime address. others were purely visual. the reviews on amazon itself trended positive across the board, which is a strange fate for a product about to be cut.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the actual end ~

by october 2022 the pandemic-era demand for anything with the word virtual in it had cooled. amazon told employees on 12 october that explore would wind down, and existing bookings would run through the end of the month. a bloomberg piece the same day called it part of a wider cost review the newly seated andy jassy was running across the consumer division. the same review had already closed amazon glow and amazon care that year.

the messaging was flat. no big final-tour campaign, no attempt to move the guides onto another amazon product, no promise of a return. one of the costa rica guides posted a long instagram note about losing what had become a decent side income during a period of no tourism. the itch was there, the customer base was not.

~ what remains ~

the interesting piece is that amazon shipped a working live-video marketplace at all. the guide side was a real cms, the booking side integrated with prime membership, the payment side handled cross-border payouts to guides in venice or mexico city or tokyo. that plumbing did not carry into any successor product. the internal team moved to other jobs. no third party bought the software.

covid tourism substitutes as a category mostly died the same year. airbnb online experiences had been the higher-profile version and it was also wound down in 2023. amazon explore was quieter and shorter-lived but sat in the same shape: a real live-video experience marketplace that only made sense while nobody could travel.

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