Nest products won’t be sold by Amazon.com any longer once current stock runs out, according to a report from Business Insider. Amazon last year declined to offer some of Nest’s newer products like the Nest Cam IQ and latest-generation smart thermostat.
After weeks of simply ignoring the products and being unresponsive to Nest, Amazon informed the company of its decision by phone late in the year and said the directive “came from the top,” something Nest took to mean it had been handed down by CEO Jeff Bezos. There has been no direct confirmation of this, however.
As a result, Nest has decided to halt further restocks at Amazon once remaining product inventory is exhausted. It’s unclear whether third-party sellers will continue selling Nest gadgets, but Amazon itself will not. In removing itself from Amazon, Nest’s reasoning is that the powerful retailer should be selling its entire product family or nothing at all. Right now, several Nest products are available with Prime shipping, but they’re “fulfilled by Amazon” and actually being sold by other vendors.
The impending disappearance of Nest from Amazon marks just the latest development in the acrimonious, anti-consumer feud between Amazon and Google. Nest was absorbed back into Google last month after spending three years as a standalone Alphabet subsidiary. (Google tipped off Nest that Amazon had decided against selling its latest hardware while the companies were still separate.)
Amazon has steadfastly refused to sell some Google-branded products like the Google Home voice assistant speaker and the company’s Pixel smartphones. In December, the online retailer said it would restart sales of the Chromecast streaming device, but it’s been three months, and you still can’t buy it. Last summer, Amazon launched a Prime Video app for Android, but has yet to add support for streaming its content with a Chromecast.
For its part in this falling out, Google has removed YouTube from Amazon’s Fire TV streaming products and the Echo Show/Spot, claiming that Amazon has violated its terms of service with those implementations of the YouTube app. There were once signs that the companies were mending the scorched bridge between them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case any longer.
Last week, Amazon announced its acquisition of Ring, a maker of smart home doorbell and in-home cameras. The company reportedly paid over $1 billion for Ring in an attempt to fast track its mission of making Alexa the dominant digital assistant in the homes of consumers. Amazon continues to sell similar products from August and other companies, but soon won’t have to worry about promoting one of its main rivals on its own store.
