With easy-to-remember names like drugstore.com and beauty.com, one might expect these Walgreens-owned websites to be doing gangbusters business. Yet the retailer says it will shutter both sites by the end of September.
Five years after Walgreens bought the sites, it says it will shut them down in order to concentrate on its own online presence, The Seattle Times reports.
“Over the past year, we have been focusing on building new omnichannel capabilities on Walgreens.com…,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso said. “After careful consideration, we have decided to shut down drugstore.com and Beauty.com. We intend to focus on Walgreens.com.”
A look at the two websites on Friday didn’t reveal any notification about their imminent closure. However, the contact page for Drugstore.com does include notice that Drugstore.com dollars — a rewards program — will no longer be accepted after Sept. 30.
“Drugstore.com dollars is ending soon: On September 30th we will be ending our drugstore.com dollars™ program.
You can still earn drugstore.com dollars™ until August 13th, 2016. After that, you can redeem all of your drugstore.com dollars™ in a redemption-only period from August 14th through September 30th.
After September 30th, 2016, all unredeemed drugstore.com dollars™ will expire and the program will end.”
The Times reports that the closure of the sites will result in some layoffs at Walgreens, but eliminated jobs will focus solely on Drugstore.com and Beauty.com employees.
Walgreens shutting its drugstore.com unit [The Seattle Times]
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist