Amazon is opening its first physical bookstore, 20 years after the world’s biggest online retailer started selling publications on the internet.
The company unveiled a shop called Amazon Books at University Village in Seattle, its home city, on Tuesday.
The store will stock about 6,000 titles, with the selection based on reviews and sales data from Amazon.com. The price of books in the store will be the same as on the website.
For Amazon to have a physical point of presence makes sense. They’ve moved into the same space as high street department stores, so it fits that they should have a place consumers can trust to look, touch and experience the products.
Amazon has slowly moved into physical retailing by launching lockers and pick-up points where customers can collect their orders, as well as kiosks where they can buy gadgets such as the Kindle e-reader.
The relationship between physical stores and online retaielrs is becoming ever more entwined. We live in an omnichannel world, so there’s a seamless blend throughout the path to purchase. People look offline and then buy online, read reviews online, then look offline, then buy whenever convenient- and this move by Amazon reflects this..
The store includes a shelf holding the bestselling books on Amazon.com and another with books that are rated 4.8 stars and above by customers. Comments from reviews are also shown next to each book.
“To give you more information as you browse, our books are face-out, and under each one is a review card with the Amazon.com customer rating and a review. You can read the opinions and assessments of Amazon.com’s book-loving customers to help you find great books,” said Jennifer Cast, the vice-president of Amazon Books.
In terms of long term strategy, it remains to be seen if Amazon can leverage in-store collection as a way of reducing its delivery costs.
A small network of stores in large cities could prove to be highly cost-effective, and strategically valuable at broadening the breadth of the shopping basket. As Amazon pushes more into the grocery space, this is a model we’re bound to see them pilot further.