Amazon Local

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

~ the last words ~

amazon local was the daily-deals business inside amazon.com, active between june 2011 and december 2015. it started as a livingsocial-powered coupon feed after amazon put $175M into livingsocial in december 2010, and it turned into its own site in 2012 under local.amazon.com. it sold half-price restaurant meals, spa visits and event tickets, sorted by city.

the timing looked good on paper. groupon was preparing its ipo in november 2011 at a $12.7B valuation, and the daily-deals category still felt like the front edge of local commerce. amazon had reach, a wallet and a livingsocial ownership stake to plug into. what it did not have was a way around the actual problem, which was that small businesses hated the economics of daily deals and users burned through their initial enthusiasm inside a year.

by 2015 the category was clearly over. groupon cut 1,100 jobs and left seven countries. livingsocial cut 20 percent of its staff and started pivoting to "experiences". amazon announced the shutdown on 29 october 2015 and turned the site off on 18 december 2015. already-purchased vouchers stayed valid so people could still get their spa visit.

i was on the other side of the daily-deals boom, in ankara on ttnet broadband. the turkish version of this era was grupanya and markafoni and biletix flash sales, all running the same coupon-fatigue arc a year or two behind the us. i did not have a us amazon account tied to a us zip code that would have shown me amazon local deals. the whole product lived on a shelf i could not reach from turkey even if i had wanted to.

~ the record ~

~ how the market died ~

daily deals had a fundamentally short half-life. a restaurant would run a 50-percent-off promo, get flooded with one-time coupon customers, watch its regular margin evaporate, and never see most of those new customers a second time. the merchants figured this out roughly two years into the boom. by 2013 groupon's take rates were falling and the merchant-acquisition cost was rising. the death of amazon local was one of several closures inside a broader collapse, not an amazon-specific mistake.

~ what amazon kept ~

amazon local shutting down did not kill deals at amazon. deal of the day, gold box deals and kindle daily deals all stayed on. what died was the local-services angle, the idea of amazon selling you a manicure at a salon two subway stops away. amazon's answer to local services eventually became amazon home services, which had a different mechanic and still failed on a different timescale. the daily-deals-as-a-category question was closed by december 2015 for everyone.

~ the tail ~

livingsocial itself did not survive much longer. groupon bought it for $0 in october 2016 (assumption of liabilities only) and shut the brand down in the following years. amazon's $175M investment went to zero. the local.amazon.com subdomain quietly redirected to amazon's main deal pages, and the amazon local mobile app disappeared from the ios and android stores through 2016. the category exists today only as memory, and only for people who used it in the 2011-2013 window before the small businesses learned to say no.

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