Amazon announced that the company will soon stop offering its two services, Local Register service and Amazon Local app, due to lack of popularity.
It seems that the company’s decision is one based on financial terms. Local Register is one of the two Amazon services that will no longer be available.
Competitors are way more popular than Amazon’s Local Register
According to Fortune, it’s a mobile credit card processing service meant for small businesses like food trucks and coffee shops. The service began working in August last year, but hasn’t provided the prospects the company was looking for. It has lower processing fees than competitors like Square and PayPal Holdings Inc, but it didn’t stuck to the customers.
Local Register will be shut down as of February 1. The second one is Amazon Local, a daily deal coupon service similar to Groupon. Launched four years ago, it won’t be able to be downloaded as of December 18, but, according to the same source, you’ll still be able to redeem coupons that you’ve already bought.
Even a failed business can be a great lesson
“We’ve learned a great deal from the daily-deals business and will look for ways to apply these lessons in the future.”, an Amazon spokerperson told Geekwire. The two Amazon services are not the only ones that are suffering in the daily deals market.
Living Social, a company of which Amazon owns a 30% stake dropped from a value of $1 billion to $242 million, in 2014. This made the company’s bosses take the decision to let go 20% of the employees. Even rivals are not doing that great. Goupon had to cut off jobs due to a drop of its share by 39% this year. Another consequence of this upset is that the company had to retreat its operations from seven countries just last month.
