17 Terrible Investments by Amazon

Amazon introduced its WebPay to compete with services like Venmo, allowing individuals to exchange funds. It was shuttered in October 2014 in the wake of poor adoption. The service would eventually be retooled and rebranded as Amazon Pay.

In 2014, Amazon introduced Wallet as a point-of-sale platform. It didn’t even last a full year. Among the app’s flaws were its reliance on QR codes and the fact that it did not hold credit or debit cards, only gift cards.

Amazon’s fire phone was released to much fanfare, intended to take a bite out of Apple’s domination of the smart tablet market. It was an unequivocal failure, dinged by reviewers for its high price and lack of apps. It was discontinued less than two years after its launch, and in Amazon’s next financial statement, the company reported an $170 million writedown, citing the Fire phone’s sales as a primary reason.

The tech giant’s 2015 venture into hotel booking, Amazon Destination was short-lived, lasting less than seven months. At the time of taking the site down, Amazon did not give a reason for abandoning the project.

Some failed Amazon investments involve trying to venture into a market in which it was unable to knock out competitors that had already established a foothold or investing in shrinking markets. Amazon Local is one such example, where the company simply got involved in an industry that was on the way out already. Local was a daily deals app meant to compete with companies like Groupon and LivingSocial, both of which have also shrunk to a fraction of their former glory.