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:
- Diapers.com
- Soap.com
- Vine.com
- Look.com
- YoYo.com
- Casa.com
- Bookworm.com
- Wag.com
- AfterSchool.com
- BeautyBar.com
This could have some reverberations within the domain name resale market. People may speculate that if Amazon couldn’t make a business profitable on a bang-on exact match domain names, others might face the same troubles. Aside from that, there are now fewer success stories for people to share when discussing the value of exact match keyword .com domain names. I regularly referred to Diapers.com to show the branding potential for an exact match .com domain name.
It remains to be seen how these domain names will be used going forward.
Two good product domains (diapers, soap), but neither can easily be manufactured and both depend upon selling other companys’ product. Nor do the products have real margin.
As far as the others, simply brandable domains that cannot be easily monetized unless a large company buys and brands a new product line, or a startup forks over big bucks which is not common. Except for casa.com which could be intuitively used in housing industry although not English word.
Just my 2 cents
Amazon knows they didn’t just buy a company, they bought a competitor with valuable real estate that could be a major competitor so Amazon could do absolutely nothing with these domains or redirect them and consider it a WIN.
Bad weather always looks worse through a window!
Selling soap or diapers online probably not a strong enough business model. Very basic commodities. Compare those to Batteries.com, which probably has better margins and serves a much broader market of varied electronics.
How much better do you think the margins would be? Wouldn’t people just search eBay and choose the lowest price from for whatever brand (or no name) battery that they want?
Shoes.com saw a similar fate at two different shoe companies.
Hard to beat diaper pricing of Walmart and Costco. It would have to be a subscription model to work probably and cater to those that can’t go out shopping or that can afford not to.
Shoes.com is easy to build out and profit from. Company just ran it wrong.
Amazon dominates the diaper market and I am sure they probably do well over double what Costco & Walmart do combined. And it’s not because they own Diapers.com, it’s because they offer 20% off a diaper subscription on Amazon.com.
Well, they prob did the sub model for Diapers.com but meant it needs to be ran by a company that doesn’t have highly paid employees. Good for a small time biz, I would think.