On Wednesday,  we learned that Amazon would  be sunsetting Quidsi brands, including Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com and others. Recode, Wall St. Journal, and CNBC  published articles sharing this news. I was an infrequent  customer of Diapers.com, and  I was a fan of the company’s usage of exact match domain names for its brands.

In my article last week, I shared a few thoughts on the news, and I thought I would share some  additional thoughts today. You are welcome to give your insight about the news. I am also interested in hearing your ideas about how Amazon will use Quidsi’s great exact match domain names, which hold considerable  value.

5 Thoughts about Amazon shutting Quidsi:

According to a news report  just published in the Financial Times  (FT), Amazon is shutting down Quidsi and its website brands. As you may recall, Quidsi operates websites on fantastic exact match .com domain names such as Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, YoYo.com, Casa.com, and others. Amazon acquired Quidsi several years ago.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the FT article:

“Amazon said on Wednesday that it was shutting down Quidsi, the company behind Diapers.com and Soap.com that it acquired for $545m less than seven years ago, after failing to make the websites profitable.”

I don’t see any information about how Amazon will utilize these domain names once the brands are shut down. It looks like the company previously shut down Vine Market, which operated on Vine.com, as that domain name now forwards to Soap.com. Perhaps Amazon will do something similar and simply forward these domain names to the relevant sections on its own website.

Using DomainIQ, I did a quick search to see some of the most valuable domain names owned by Quidsi, and here’s what I found:

Ever since I was a kid, my Mom bought sweet Vidalia onions for cooking. Because of my familiarity with this type of onion,  I was a bidder in the NameJet auction for VidaliaOnions.com in 2014. Luckily for Peter Askew, I  was the underbidder when Peter  bought  the domain name  for $2,200. This sale now looks like a great bargain.

Shortly after acquiring the domain name, Peter set out to build a business on it. He partnered up with a local farm renown for its Vidalia onions, and the business is growing. In fact, VidaliaOnions.com is now taking orders for its Spring crop, with shipping scheduled to begin on May 1, 2017. As the domain name and branding suggests, the company specializes in the sale of vidalia onions.

I asked Peter about how VidaliaOnions.com went from domain auction win to fully operational business, and here’s what he told me:

On the home page of Boston.com, it looks like the publication is advertising a parked domain name. Under the “Most Popular” heading on the right side of the home page, there is a headline that says “Love Letters.com.” Not only is LoveLetters.com a domain name parked with Uniregistry, but the publication doesn’t even own this domain name either. This makes no sense to me.

When visitors click on the sidebar link, they are taken to a feature section called Love Letters. Interestingly, when hovering over the LoveLetters logo at the top of the page below the masthead, the alt text is “Love Letters .com.” According to the About page, “Love Letters is a daily dispatch of advice for the lovelorn that launched on Boston.com in 2009.” It doesn’t seem to make sense to promote this as LoveLetters.com.