Amazon to stop selling daily deals, AmazonLocal site to close

Amazon yesterday announced that it would stop selling daily deals from both its AmazonLocal site and its corresponding app from 18 December.

But customers who had already bought deals would be able to use them. Amazon also revealed it was shutting down the Local Register that competed with the likes of Square and PayPal to process payments for small businesses.

Amazon would no longer accept new customers, and the service will be fully shut down on 1 February 2016.

An Amazon spokesperson said, ''Effective 18 December, 2015, we will stop selling Amazon Local daily deals. We've learned a great deal from the daily deals business and will look for ways to apply these lessons in the future as we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers and merchants.''

According to commentators, the move was not unexpected, rather it was overdue. Daily deals were the hot idea in e-commerce until just about everyone clambered onto the bandwagon and the buzz fueling the market eventually dried up.

Rival deals site Groupon had a disastrous IPO back in late 2011 and its stock traded at a fraction of a fraction of what it used to. Most recently, it had been reported that Groupon had only been able to register 5 per cent of the merchants that made up its target market.

Amazon would now clear out its inventory and continue to sell deals, with customers being able to use both the site and app as usual.

According to Amazon, the vouchers could be redeemed after Amazon Local closed, as the website itself would remain online so users could continue to access their used and unused vouchers.

Though Amazon would no longer directly run a daily deals platform, it would continue to offer ''deals'' of some sort via the main Amazon.com website.

Its Deal of the Day, Gold Box Deals and Kindle Daily Deals would not be affected by Amazon Local's shutdown.

The company further added, it was not exiting local commerce entirely – Amazon Home Services, a service for finding local pros, would remain online, and it was continuing to work with local restaurants through Amazon Prime Now.