Amazon Shuts Down Try Before You Buy Program 

Amazon will shut down its Try Before You Buy Amazon Prime program at the end of January 2024.

The service, launched in 2018 as Prime Wardrobe, allowed users to choose up to six items to try on and then send back the ones they didn’t like for a refund. The service competed with similar try-before-you-buy services, such as Stitch Fix. Provided you returned the goods within a week, you were only charged for what you kept.

An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC: “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,”

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 down its return volume. In 2022, returns are estimated to have cost US retailers about US$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 try to trim back plenty of its offerings outside its core areas over the past year. In November 2024, Amazon shut down Freevee, a free, ad-supported streaming television service that first launched as part of the movie review database IMDb.

That same month, CNBC reported that Amazon had stopped working on a secretive project focused on developing an at-home fertility tracking product, which was part of its “moonshot” incubator, which focuses on ambitious experimental projects.

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I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.

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