Last year, as part of its march toward inevitable world domination, Amazon opened a store to sell cable service. No, it wasn’t getting into the business: Amazon signed up customers and collected a commission. Now, however, the Everything Store no longer sells telecom services.
The Cable Store started around this time last year, and began with customizable Xfinity bundles. According to TechCrunch, Frontier joined the re-selling party in November of last year. Now the experiment is over, and you can no longer get your cable connected by clicking a few options and throwing it in your Amazon cart.
If you’re a regular Amazon shopper, you might have felt more at-home selecting from different cable packages in the same format that you use to select different colors of hard drives.
The pages also let customers leave reviews for their cable, internet, and phone providers, which DSLReports speculates may have had something to do with why the the cable store closed. Or maybe people simply expect to see phrases like “Garbage local monopoly” in reviews of their cable providers.
Amazon, of course, won’t say why it really closed the store. “Amazon is constantly testing and launching new offerings to innovate on behalf of customers,” a company spokesperson told TVPredictions, the site that broke the story.
In theory, it was a good idea: The e-commerce giant received a commission on every plan sale, and would be able to cross-sell service to people buying, say, televisions. It would also be able to sell TVs or modems to customers signing up for cable through Comcast or Frontier.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist