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Amazon will shut down its Try Before You Buy Amazon Prime program at the end of January.
The service, launched in 2018 as Prime Wardrobe, competed with similar try-before-you-buy services, such as Stitch Fix. It allowed users to choose up to six items to try on at home; they could keep what they liked and return those they didn't want. Provided the goods were returned within a week, they were only charged for what they kept.
Seven years later, Amazon says Try Before You Buy no longer makes economic sense.
"Given the combination of Try Before You Buy only scaling to a limited number of items and customers increasingly using our new AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts to make sure they find the right fit, we’re phasing out the Try Before You Buy option, effective January 31, 2025,” an Amazon spokesperson tells CNBC.
The service is still available at the time of writing, so you can still try it if you get your orders in fast enough. But it may be no surprise that Amazon is looking to trim its return volume. In 2022, returns are estimated to have cost US retailers about $816 billion in lost sales, almost double the cost of returns in 2020, The Conversation notes.
Though CEO Andy Jassy has promised that Amazon will continue to grow in almost every area over the next decade, we've seen Amazon scale back a number of offerings in the last year, from its "Just Walk Out" in-store tech to its Alexa developer rewards program.