Nike is the latest brand to run, not walk, away from Amazon:
Nike will stop selling its products through Amazon and instead focus on what it called “more direct, personal relationships” with customers, company officials announced Tuesday.
Anyone looking for Nike can still purchase items on the company website, its app, or at one of the thousands of brick-and-mortar stores where Nike has retail partnerships. The Nike-Amazon partnership was a pilot program that began more than two years ago and is no longer part of Nike’s wider sales strategy, company officials said.
“We will continue to invest in strong, distinctive partnerships for Nike with other retailers and platforms to seamlessly serve our consumers globally,” Nike confirmed.
Amazon officials on Wednesday declined to comment about Nike’s departure. Nike competitors Under Armour and Adidas continue to sell products on Amazon. Nike officials said they will continue using Amazon web hosting to power the Nike website and many of its apps.
The Nike-Amazon split comes one month after the sports apparel and equipment company named John Donahoe its incoming CEO. Donahoe, the former CEO of eBay, takes over for departing Nike CEO Mark Parker on Jan. 13.
Amazon simply doesn’t make sense anymore for any company that has a direct relationship with its customers. For example, even setting aside campaigns like Alt-Hero and the Junior Classics, the Replatforming + Deluxe will produce more revenue every month for Castalia than our very best month on Amazon ever did. This is the culmination of what began 18 months ago as the realization that KU was inevitably bound to destroy the ebook market.
There is no reason for us to not permit people to buy Castalia books on Amazon, which is why our works will still be available there. But the truth is that Amazon is now an ancillary revenue stream that no longer even factors into our core decision making.