Jeff Bezos is stepping down as Amazon CEO, and handing day-to-day control of the business he founded 27 years ago to the chief executive of Amazon's Cloud business, Andy Jassy. Over 27 years, Bezos has grown Amazon from a small bookshop in his garage to the fourth-biggest company in the world, with services spanning online retail and Al devices to cashless supermarkets and even a hairdressing salon. But not everything launched by the world’s richest person has turned into a hugely successful money-spinner. Click or scroll through to discover 24 of Amazon’s biggest flops.

Amazon hasn't always invited vendors to sell products through its site – the idea was first floated in 1999 as Amazon Auction, a bidding platform that was launched four years after rival eBay. However, by 2001 merchants had started to pull away from the site and Amazon was laying off its Auction staff as it sought to focus on other online retail ventures. Amazon also struck a deal with auction house Sotheby’s in 1999, but that fell through after then-CEO of the auction house Diana Brooks (pictured here with Jeff Bezos in 1999) pleaded guilty to price-fixing and the companies opted to shut down the partnership.

In 2006, Amazon established its own message board, similar in format to Yahoo Answers and Google Answers, both of which have also been dropped – Google axed Answers the same year that Amazon launched Askville, while Yahoo cut its service for good in May this year. Askville lasted until 2013 and the archive of its posts was taken down in 2019.

Founded in 2007, endless.com was Amazon’s first foray into the world of online retail outside of Amazon.com and it sold shoes, bags and other accessories. Five years later the e-commerce behemoth instead chose to focus on revamping the apparel and accessories section of its flagship website and endless.com was no more. The site's URL now directs users to the fashion area of Amazon.com.

Launched in 1997, Amazon 1-Click soon became a popular feature of the site as it allowed return customers to make purchases quickly without having to re-enter their card details for every transaction. PayPhrase was another arm of the same concept, allowing shoppers to pay using a unique string of words, such as “Jake’s Allowance”, alongside a PIN number to check out quickly. The feature was introduced in 2009, but was scrapped just three years later. Amazon has never revealed how many customers actually chose to use the feature at checkout.

Amazon has acquired a number of profit-turning businesses in its time, including Whole Foods, Twitch and Audible, but not all its buys have been worth the money. In 2010 Amazon bought Quidsi – the parent company of speciality retailer Diapers.com – for $545 million (£365.4m), but after seven years of trying to make the company profitable Amazon decided to shut down the business. Closing the unit caused more than 260 redundancies, but Bloomberg reported that a number of those employees were set to be hired by Amazon directly.

Another platform that Amazon ran parallel to its primary website was Amazon Webstore, which was established in 2010. It allowed small- and medium-sized businesses to set up their own stores online and reach customers directly. In 2015 Amazon announced that users had a year to find another vendor as it was closing down the Webstore, and it later promoted Canadian-owned platform Shopify as an alternative.

Another apparel site built separately to Amazon.com was MyHabit.com, which was launched as a flash sale site in 2011. The platform met the same fate as endless.com and was folded into the fashion section of Amazon.com in 2016.

Amazon Local was another flash deals site that crumbled, shutting down in 2015. The platform was similar to the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial in that it offered daily coupons and offers on an array of products. The rise and fall of Amazon Local followed the general trajectory of the market, as competitor sites were also floundering and laying off employees around the same time.

Amazon’s real money maker is its online retail services, and its attempts to transition into the world of brick-and-mortar stores haven’t always gone as well as probably hoped. It opened its first pop-up store around seven years ago – the idea was that would-be customers could turn up at the stores and try out Amazon’s gadgets, such as the Echo or Fire TV, before purchasing them online. By April 2019, all 87 of the company’s pop-up locations were closed down, with the company shifting its focus to more self-serve store concepts such as the staff-free and cashless Amazon Go locations that have sprung up in various cities across the US, and London.

From cashless stores to home robots, discover Amazon's future plans

Some of Amazon’s ventures have been cancelled before they even had time to make a splash, such as Amazon Wallet. Launched in mid-2014, the company’s e-wallet allowed users to store and manage Amazon gift cards, store cards and loyalty cards through its app. But, unlike finance apps from competitor companies, users were unable to use it to manage their credit and debit cards. Amazon Wallet lasted just six months before it was axed.

Another foray into the finance sector was Local Register, which provided small businesses with a card reader to process payments through a smartphone. The dongle was launched in autumn 2014, posing direct competition to market leader Square. It had nothing to worry about, however, as Amazon's card reader was discontinued in November 2015.

Amazon also tried to take on another big name in the mobile payments sector: PayPal. WebPay was Amazon’s version and it facilitated payments between people, but it failed to gain the customers enjoyed by its market-dominating competitor. The payment platform was shuttered in October 2014 and morphed into Amazon Pay, a more successful payment service that allows for money to be transferred between shoppers and sellers.

Often heralded as Amazon’s biggest failure, the Fire Phone was the company’s first – and so far only – venture into the smartphone market. The phone was launched by Jeff Bezos in June 2014, but critics were quick to highlight the high price and lack of features, prompting the price of the handset for a two-year contract to plummet from $200 (£145) to just $0.99 (£0.71). The Fire Phone only remained on the market for another year or so before it was taken off the shelves.

Amazon launched screenwriting app Storywriter in 2015, which was designed to give everybody and anybody the chance to get their scripts in front of Amazon Studios through its open submission platform. Only one screenplay seems to have graduated from the app into a real-life TV show though – Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, which was written by amateur writer David Anaxagoras and aired from 2014 to 2016. Storywriter’s script submission programme was shut down in 2018, and the whole platform and its features were axed last month, following an email announcement to users in May.

Amazon’s short-lived Dash buttons allowed customers to replenish their kitchen cupboards at the push of a button. First released in 2015, the adhesive buttons could be attached to various surfaces and would be pre-set to order a specific quantity of an item from Amazon when pushed. The company discontinued its physical Dash buttons in 2019 as the focus shifted to encouraging customers to order through its AI-based features instead.

Amazon tried to get its foot into the entertainment and experiences door in 2015 when it started selling tickets. The following year saw the official launch of ticket-selling platform Amazon Tickets. In November 2017, the US launch of the platform was delayed indefinitely and just three months later the UK ticket-selling arm was announced to be shutting down. Amazon had tried to take on big players in the industry such as Ticketmaster by offering premium seats to its Prime members, but the move didn’t pay off and the company opted to exit the market.

It wasn’t just concert tickets that you could book through Amazon. Between April and October 2015, the company ran its own hotel-booking website called Amazon Destinations. The site focused on helping Amazon customers to find weekend break destinations located within driving distance of their homes. After spreading out across 35 US cities, the site vanished after just five months in business.

Amazon Echo devices have been hugely successful, but a mobile version of the smart speaker, Amazon Tap, spent just two years on Amazon’s virtual shelves before it was discontinued in 2018. The speaker was battery-powered as it was designed to be portable and, as the name suggests, users needed to tap the device to activate Alexa. All in all, the Tap was less practical than later iterations of the Echo.

Restaurant food delivery is one of the nuts that Amazon has been trying to crack for a while, and on 11 June this year the company told Geekwire that its US arm of Amazon Restaurants would be shutting down after five years in business. Amazon Restaurants’ stint in the UK was even briefer, having launched in 2016 before grinding to a halt just two years later. The service made it to 20 US cities and London but struggled against established names in the game such as Uber Eats, DoorDash and Deliveroo. Amazon is still in the industry though, having snapped up a 15.8% stake in British company Deliveroo last summer, which it then reduced to an 11.5% share at the company’s IPO in March. 

Now read about Amazon's future plans

Amazon successfully bought organic food retailer Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion (£9.9bn), but the company decided to drop the Whole Foods 365 concept in 2019. The spin-off stores had tried to attract younger shoppers with lower price points and even considered bringing tattoo parlours into some of its locations. Amazon canned the brand, saying that its new, cheaper Whole Foods pricing would mean there was minimal difference between the two types of store. 

Nowadays Amazon rules the roost when it comes to online sales, but all didn’t go to plan when the company tried to capture a new audience in 2017 with the launch of its Instagram-like visual shopping platform Amazon Spark. The Amazon add-on was full of photos and the products featured in the images were available to purchase through Amazon. The company shut Spark down in mid-2019 after the project didn’t really get off the ground. Experts suggested it failed to strike the right balance between being both a retail website and a social media 'discovery platform'.

One of Amazon’s most attractive qualities is its super-speedy home delivery, but in 2017 the company trialled designated collection points where customers could pick up their goods within minutes of ordering them. Snacks, drinks and essential items were among the products that shoppers could pick up from a secure locker in super-quick time. Instant Pickup didn’t last long though, and the service was pulled in 2018. That said, Amazon Lockers where people can pick up products they have ordered still exist.

Amazon is gaining a foothold in the health sector thanks to its Amazon Care venture, which launched in September 2019 and offers healthcare to its employees and their families. It has also been supplying hospitals for quite some time and plans to sell drugs directly to employers and health plans in the coming years. But a joint healthcare venture with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway launched in 2018 wasn’t quite as successful. The three companies established Haven in an attempt to tackle rising healthcare costs and look after their employees, but after its CEO stepped away, the not-for-profit was left without much financial backing and it shut down in February this year.

Amazon spent five years developing the free-to-play multiplayer game Crucible ahead of its release in May last year. But, despite the huge surge in gaming as people were stuck at home during periods of lockdown at the height of the pandemic, the hero shooter game didn’t make a mark on the saturated industry. Having spent millions of dollars on development Amazon pulled the game from stores just one month after it failed to attract enough players to turn a profit. The team behind Crucible disabled gameplay entirely in November last year.

Now read about what Jeff Bezos is focusing on now he's stepping away from Amazon