Evernote to stop fulfilling Evernote Market orders, says it’s ‘a software company’

Evernote has announced that as of February 3, it will no longer sell or fulfill orders for integrated products in its marketplace. The company has opted to shift that responsibility to its partners, while it focuses on being a software company.

Started in 2013, Evernote Market was a place to purchase productivity tools and products, often physical ones, that had some tangential relation to Evernote’s mission. The company worked with partners like Adonit, Moleskine, and PFU on products that were integrated with the productivity and note-taking app. At one point, revenue from Market accounted for 30 percent of Evernote’s monthly sales, and the company claimed that in its first year, the service sold $12 million in goods.

In a blog post, Evernote’s head of partnership, John Hoye, explained that more than 800,000 Evernote Moleskine notebooks, 300,000 Jot Script styluses, and 20,000 ScanSnap Evernote Edition scanners were sold throughout the Market’s lifetime.

However, under new leadership, Evernote is looking to refocus its energy on things that will help improve its future. CEO Chris O’Neill has since discontinued unlimited storage for premium customers, and shuttered the company’s food app as well as its Skitch app, laid off 47 people, and closed 3 offices. All of this was done to refocus the company’s efforts, and the removal of Evernote Market appears to be the latest result of that effort.

Signs of Evernote Market’s shift in status became apparent in December when some noticed that the service was no longer being promoted within Evernote’s apps.

Although Evernote will no longer actively sell third-party products, its partners will continue to make and sell them. The company also said that it will continue to add more partners and integrations in the future.

While Evernote Market will cease to be what it once was, the company has not said what’ll happen to those orders it receives up to February 3. It’s likely that it will honor those orders and then afterwards will no longer handle fulfillment, or it’ll just pass along those orders to its partners.

Update as of 12:57 p.m. on Tuesday: A company spokesperson told VentureBeat that Evernote will continue to fulfill orders through Wednesday evening and that no orders will remain unfulfilled. Any new orders after that will be processed by its partners.