Evernote’s eCommerce Experiment Ends

More rough times for Evernote. The firm has announced that, as of 6 p.m. PST, Market will be no more.

Market is the firm’s eCommerce platform — home of all relevant Evernote swag and eIntegrated office products — that was designed as a supplemental income stream for the firm and built to cater to its more dedicated users. This news comes paired with TechCrunch‘s reported departure of Ronda Scott, the firm’s head of communications and content.

This is the latest in a string of senior players emigrating out of the firm — most notably, CEO Phil Libin in September of last year. The once billion dollar startup has been giving underperforming products the boot lately as it attempts to claw its way back to unicorn status in the eyes of the large fund managers that have been marking it down of late.

“Evernote is a software company. Building and perfecting the Evernote experience is where we’ll be focusing our future efforts. Instead of selling and fulfilling orders ourselves, on Feb. 3, we will transition the Market to promote Evernote-integrated products made and sold by our partners at Adonit, Moleskine and PFU. We plan to continue adding partners and integrations that strongly and elegantly complement Evernote to that list,” wrote Head of Partnerships John Hoye in a blog post announcing the news.

Remaining products will be shown off in the form of links, which will redirect users to other sites in order to purchase them, a spokesperson confirmed.

Evernote’s challenges over the last several years have involved building a profitable business on the freemium model. And Evernote did manage to snap up 150 million users globally, drawn to the company’s promise of permanent digital storage lockers. How many of those users are paying for the service remains a mystery; that number is not broken out.

The firm’s forays into things like Moleskine notebooks — an oddly papery choice for a company premised on migrating paper into the digital cloud — has not been profitable and seems to be at an end. Instead, Evernote is getting back to basics with its cloud services and looking to drive more premium users.

A spokesperson told TechCrunch that in a spot of good news, those paying user figures have gone up 40 percent in the last year. Of course, without knowing what the starting point was, it is hard to assess just how good that news was.