Amazon Webstore, geared towards small business e-retailers, was launched in May 2010. Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, said his best guess was that Amazon Webstore was an experiment that didn't hit the company's internal goals, leading executives to focus on other areas.

“Amazon commonly follows this pattern – try things and the ones that work keep living, while the ones that don’t, they sunset,” said Wingo. “It’s kind of a Darwinian approach that many large companies take, but it seems to work.”

Wingo said ChannelAdvisor has about 200 customers on the Amazon Webstore platform, and their analysis indicates that there are about 2,000 total Amazon Webstores out there.

“There are around 300 branded manufacturers on the platform and the others are SMB/mid-tier retailers,” said Wingo. “The good news is Amazon has given a very long load time for the closure and there are a lot of alternatives for Amazon Webstore users to pick from.”

Wingo said Shopify and BigCommerce are similar SaaS options for SMB-oriented retailers. Magento is an option for someone that wants to explore an on-premise option.

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