Messaging app company Tango shut down an in-app commerce feature it launched earlier this year, called Tango Shop, and laid off around 9 per cent of its employees, TechCrunch reported.

The company had partnered with Walmart and Alibaba, the latter of which is an investor in Tango.

According to its CTO, Eric Setton: “The initiative didn’t really pan out. [There was a] good amount of traffic but the volume didn’t materialise. [We recently] updated the app to take the e-commerce flow out, but unfortunately couldn’t keep the team working on that initiative.”

However, he said revenue this year “is an order of magnitude about what we’ve ever seen before”.

Back in May, when it last revealed user figures, Tango said it had 300 million registered users. No fresh figures are available, which TechCrunch mooted is a sign that user growth is stalling, likely due to competition from Snapchat, Kik, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.