Walgreens to shutter Drugstore.com and Beauty.com, which were a part of a $429M acquisition in 2011, to focus on its own website
Paul Ziobro / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Walgreens paid $429M in 2011 for what became Drugstore.com and Beauty.com, ran them as separate storefronts for five years, and is now folding them into its own website — an early instance of what became a recurring retail pattern. Amazon later shuttered its Quidsi division, home of Soap.com and Diapers.com, after failing to make it profitable, and Walmart went further still, discontinuing Jet.com despite growing e-commerce sales and selling off Shoes.com and Bare Necessities in a broader digital streamlining.
The through-line: retailers that bought standalone e-commerce brands during the acquisition boom found two storefronts cost more than they returned, and consolidated onto their flagship domains. Rakuten's closure of its US store, originally Buy.com, completed the same arc.
First-order effects
- Drugstore.com and Beauty.com customers are redirected to Walgreens.com, ending the standalone brands from the $429M acquisition and consolidating that traffic and customer data on Walgreens' own site.
Second-order effects
- Rivals lose a fragmented competitive field: with Walgreens funneling everything through one domain, pharmacy e-commerce competition shifts to a head-to-head between flagship sites rather than a spread of niche storefronts.
Third-order effects
- The move presaged a structural unwind of the 2010-2011 e-commerce acquisition wave — Amazon's Quidsi shutdown, Walmart's Jet.com discontinuation and Shoes.com sale, and Rakuten's Buy.com closure all followed the same logic — leaving large retailers running one primary web storefront each rather than portfolios of acquired brands.
- For Walgreens specifically, consolidation freed focus for operations over storefronts, a direction later visible in its push into automated drug-filling centers expected to save over $1B per year.
The trend: Major retailers are systematically shutting or selling the standalone e-commerce brands they acquired in the early-2010s shopping spree, consolidating digital retail around a single flagship site per company.