Amazon Webstore

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

~ the goodbye ~

i have never sold anything on the internet. no store, no inventory. amazon webstore was software for people whose entire working day was those two things, which is a part of the web i have only ever looked at from the buyer's side of the checkout page.

amazon services had a second business sitting underneath the retail one, which was renting out the machinery. the enterprise version of it ran other companies' websites outright. webstore was the self-serve version, a hosted storefront you configured yourself, answering at its own subdomain by 2007.

the archived front page from february 2008 states the terms without any embarrassment. fifty nine dollars and ninety nine cents a month, plus a seven percent commission on sales. credit card processing and fraud screening came with that. so did as many separate stores as you wanted. you could also drop amazon's own catalog into your store and take a referral fee on it, which tells you whose interests the pricing had been arranged around.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

on 24 may 2010 amazon services relaunched the whole product. scott pulsipher, the director running it, said the point was to make it simple for retailers and manufacturers to build and operate a world-class e-commerce business. the price had collapsed by then: nine dollars and ninety nine cents a month plus zero point seven percent of sales if you were already using selling on amazon and fulfillment by amazon, with payment processing charged at one point nine percent plus thirty cents a transaction.

the press release named customers and the list is stranger than you would guess. timex ran on it. black and decker, honeywell, sherwin-williams, motorola, martha stewart and MTV were all on the same page. timex's e-commerce director is quoted saying they saw an immediate lift of forty percent in revenue and average order size after the switch. amazon said webstore powered the multichannel commerce offerings of thousands of retailers and manufacturers.

~ the actual end ~

the notice went out on 16 march 2015. the sentence everybody quoted afterward is completely flat: we are writing to let you know that, effective july 1, 2016, we will discontinue the amazon webstore service. fifteen months of warning is a long runway by any standard and considerably longer than amazon usually gives anything. the instruction attached to it was to secure all relevant data from your webstore and move to a new platform.

no reason was given and none was needed. shopify had spent those years building the same thing and charging a flat fee for it instead of a percentage. a storefront platform that takes a cut of your sales competes badly against one that does not, particularly when the company taking the cut also operates the largest competing store on the planet.

~ the funny part ~

on 17 september 2015 shopify announced it had been selected as the preferred migration provider for amazon webstore merchants. plans started at twenty nine dollars a month with a thirty day trial, and shopify put staff on the migrations. its shares rose about twenty three percent on the news.

so amazon closed its storefront platform and then personally walked its remaining customers over to the company that would spend the following decade being the alternative to selling on amazon. webstore.amazon.com does not resolve in 2026. the replacement page at services.amazon.com/webstore redirected for a while and was returning 404 by march 2019, which is the tidier of the two endings.

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