17 Terrible Investments by Amazon

Speaking of, Amazon invested $175 million in LivingSocial in 2010. But that company, like Amazon Local, fell precipitously from its brief period of wild success. In the third quarter of 2012, the company posted a net loss of $0.37 per share, with the primary culprit being a $169 million loss from its LivingSocial investment.

Amazon Local Register, introduced in 2014, was the company’s attempt to compete with properties like Apple Pay and Square, providing a $10 smartphone dongle to read credit cards. However, it failed to catch on and the company stopped selling it in 2015 and discontinued support the following year.

In 2010, Amazon bought Quidsi, parent of a number of specialized retail websites, including diapers.com, beautybar.com, and yoyo.com. The $545 million investment proved to be for naught: Amazon shut the company down in 2017, citing a failure to make the company profitable.

Amazon’s LoveFilm was the European equivalent of Netflix, not as it is now as a content streaming platform, but the by-mail DVD rental business of the early 2000s. LoveFilm, a British company, was founded in 2003. Amazon took stake in the company in 2008 and acquired it in its entirety in 2011 for about $200 million. In 2017, the company announced it would end LoveFilm services entirely.

Junglee was a silicon valley-founded comparison shopping service, used in India. Founded in 1998, Amazon bought the site in 2012. But soon Junglee began to be decimated by the success of its own parent company, and in November 2017, the company rolled the company’s operations into Amazon.in.