Amazon cancels its QVC-like shopping show “Style Code Live”, which launched in March 2016
Context & Ripple Effects
Style Code Live was Amazon's first foray into live selling — a QVC-style web show launched in March 2016 — and its cancellation after roughly a year makes it one of the shorter-lived entries in Amazon's long history of shut-down experiments like TestDrive.
What makes the cancellation notable is that the underlying bet survived it: two years later Amazon rebuilt the concept as Amazon Live with a creator-hosting app, and by 2022 was running ~15 livestreams a day in India with 150+ creators. The 2017 kill looks less like a verdict on live shopping than on doing it with an in-house TV-style show.
First-order effects
- The show's hosts and production team lose their program, and Amazon's only live-shopping channel goes dark roughly fourteen months after launch.
Second-order effects
- The failure pushes Amazon to change the model rather than abandon it — the eventual Amazon Live relaunch swaps salaried show hosts for a free iOS app that lets brands and outside creators stream, shifting production cost off Amazon's books.
Third-order effects
- If the kill-then-rebuild pattern holds, early-format failures at Amazon function as cheap option pricing: the company retires the expensive version, waits for creator tooling and audience habits to mature, then re-enters with a platform structure — as the India rollout's scale suggests.
The trend: Live commerce at major retailers advances through kill-and-relaunch cycles, with each failed first-party experiment preceding a cheaper creator-driven version of the same format.