Amazon Local
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Amazon Local was Amazon's daily-deals platform, launched in 2011 during the height of the daily-deals boom as a competitor to Groupon and LivingSocial. It sold discounted vouchers for local services such as restaurants, spas, vacations, and entertainment, initially featuring deals from LivingSocial, in which Amazon had invested. The service operated in about 40 markets across the United States and later added capabilities such as food carryout ordering in Seattle. It never became the go-to destination for daily deals.
02 / Amazon Local FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
Amazon publicly announced it was exiting the daily-deals business and would stop selling Amazon Local daily deals effective 18 December 2015 (homepage notice plus spokesperson statement to TechCrunch). Amazon did not publish a further internal causal analysis beyond that product exit.
Amazon stated it would stop selling Amazon Local daily deals and exit the daily-deals space as of 18 December 2015.
The Amazon Local website and mobile app would stop selling deals on that date; Amazon said Deal of the Day, Gold Box, and Kindle Daily Deals were unaffected.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Launch
Amazon launches Amazon Local, a daily-deals service offering discounted vouchers for food, vacations, and entertainment, initially featuring deals from LivingSocial.
- Shutdown
Amazon announces on October 30, 2015 that it will stop selling daily deals on Amazon Local on December 18, 2015, exiting the daily-deals business as the market slumps. Purchased vouchers remain redeemable, the Amazon Local app is discontinued, and Amazon's Deal of the Day, Gold Box, and Kindle Daily Deals are unaffected.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Daily deals represented only a tiny fraction of Amazon's overall sales, so the direct business impact of the shutdown was small.
- 02
Amazon had previously taken a $169 million write-down on its investment in LivingSocial, a partly-owned competitor that itself laid off 20% of staff in 2015.
- 03
No separate loss figure for the Amazon Local unit was ever disclosed; the division was simply folded as Amazon shifted focus to higher-margin businesses.