Dive Brief:

• Amazon is reportedly slowing down its Amazon Webstore e-commerce platform services for small and medium retailers, allowing them a year to close up shop and switch to another platform.

• The niche is seeing a bit of turbulence, with Shopify and Bigcommerce raising venture capital while eBay’s Magento Go was also recently discontinued.

• Amazon hasn’t confirmed the news and its Webstore page as of Thursday morning was still inviting potential new customers to a 30-day trial. 

Dive Insight:

At first blush, Amazon’s formable e-commerce operation and cloud services seem to make it a natural vendor to help smaller retailers scale their e-commerce business. But its capacity and its enticing Fulfillment by Amazon opportunity haven’t been enough for many retailers, some of whom say they also expected more built-in traffic and marketing. The e-commerce giant probably also lost a few customers when it significantly raised Webstore rates last year. 

And the Webstore at Amazon seems to be somewhat in disarray. One client that already moved on to Shopify seven months ago, for example, is still presented on the Webstore materials as a case study, according to Internet Retailer.