Amazon Will Shut Down Amazon Webstore, Its Competitor to Shopify and Bigcommerce
Jason Del Rey / Re/code :
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's Webstore was its direct answer to Shopify and Bigcommerce in hosted storefronts, and shutting it down concedes that battlefield entirely. The concession was real enough that within months Amazon itself steered its own Webstore users toward Shopify — a migration that sent Shopify shares up 24%.
That retreat aged poorly for Amazon: analysts soon framed Shopify's fulfillment-equipped ecosystem as potentially the first true Amazon rival, pandemic-era coverage counted Shopify among the upstarts taking share, and by 2021 Amazon had quietly bought Australian startup Selz — an apparent attempt to re-enter the merchant-platform game it abandoned here.
First-order effects
- Merchants running stores on Amazon Webstore must find a new platform, and the named alternatives are Shopify and Bigcommerce — with Amazon itself pointing users at Shopify.
Second-order effects
- Shopify inherits Amazon's exiting customer base and the credibility of being Amazon's recommended replacement, strengthening exactly the rival coverage would later describe as Amazon's first genuine challenger.
Third-order effects
- E-commerce splits structurally into two camps — Amazon's first-party marketplace versus merchant-owned storefront platforms — and Amazon's failed head-on entry pushes it toward acquisitions like Selz rather than internal builds when it wants back in.
The trend: This shutdown is an early data point in the marketplace-versus-storefront split of e-commerce, in which the platform Amazon walked away from grew into its most credible competitor.