It's time to add another service to the list of Amazon's shuttered projects. The company is pulling the plug on Amazon Local, its Groupon-style daily deals site. A notice on the site's homepage says that the service will be gone for good come December 18th; until then, it will continue selling off its remaining inventory of vouchers and deals. If you happened to purchase one such deal, fret not, as Amazon says that all existing vouchers will be honored despite the shutdown.
The move does not come as a surprise: daily deals appear to have been a fad. Groupon, which made its name in the business, has collapsed in the last few years, and has tried pivoting a couple of times to keep itself alive. LivingSocial, too, has found itself in trouble as the market for daily deals withers. It announced plans to layoff 20 percent of its staff this month. Local first launched in June 2011, right in the middle of the daily deals peak.
Amazon Local likely won't be missed, but the company says in a statement that its DNA may live on: "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."