In the late 2000s, diapers.com and its parent company Quidsi had built a limited but successful e-commerce business — until Jeff Bezos called them in for a meeting. As reported in Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store, Bezos tried to by the company — and when they refused, began rapidly dropping Amazon’s diaper prices, including under a newly launched Amazon Mom product.
The new venture was a disaster for diapers.com. As Quidsi saw it, the only way to sustain those low prices was by selling diapers at a loss, which Quidsi estimated to be as high as $100 million every three months. Quidsi’s customer base plummeted and, after a bidding war with Walmart, the company finally sold out to Amazon. As Stone suggests, the sale was made...
