Does Amazon Shuttering Selz Mean an Amazon eCommerce Platform Not Coming Soon?

Geekwire learned that Amazon is shutting down Selz - an eCommerce platform it acquired last year -- as its employees are now focused on "Buy With Prime." Indeed, no new signups are now happening on Selz, and merchants will have 60 day notice to find new platforms.

First, ouch. That's a short amount of time. Not many merchants I'm sure, but ...

Second, if Amazon was going to use Selz as a foundation for anything, they surely would have at least kept those small amount of merchants, right?

In the past few years, Amazon has acquired a few different eCommerce companies around the world: Veeqo, Selz, and Perpule. It seems primarily for acqui-hire purposes.

Amazon often likes to put existing employees in a new area even if they have no experience there, but after some fumbling with their Stores strategy, their approach changed to bring in some outsiders with a vision for eCommerce.

It was thought that Amazon was planning on (re-) introducing its own eCommerce platform. But perhaps Amazon has decided that the best eCommerce platform is "all of them" and Buy With Prime is the initiative that they will put all their effort behind. Focusing instead on partnershpis with platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc.

It's a bit of a risky play -- essentially that the value of the services and Prime will be enough for merchants to pull this into their ecosystem, rather than having control over your own distribution in your own eCommerce platform. We've seen a lot of companies recently stumble that didn't control the distribution channel for their own products.

Amazon needed off-Amazon Prime to be successful first, so I agree with their prioritization here, and it doesn't rule out building an eCommerce platform later on.

As Amazon has shown in the past - that's a two-way door decision.