The company famed for its digital prowess has officially entered the brick-and-mortar world.
Amazon is celebrating 20 years of success in the online world by taking a portion of its original core business offline. With the recent opening of Amazon Books in the University Village area of Seattle, the company famed for its digital prowess has officially entered the brick-and-mortar world.
Amazon’s entry into the physical market is an ironic move for the retailer credited with helping run Borders and other bookstores out of business. When the company went online in 1995, it revolutionized the bookselling industry. By making titles both popular and obscure available at the push of a few buttons, Amazon proved itself adept at meeting customer needs in a way regular bookstores couldn’t match.
While Borders failed to stand up to Amazon’s competition, going down the tube in 2011, another bookselling giant has remained in the market. Barnes & Noble created a model that withstood the challenge posed by Amazon, but it had to adapt to survive. Like Amazon, Barnes & Noble embraced the Internet and launched its own digital reading tool in the Nook. While these measures have kept it going strong, the journey hasn’t been easy. The company has shed about 20 locations annually over the past few years to keep itself afloat.
Taking the lessons it doled out to the industry to heart, Amazon intends for its physical location to be different than the competition. The plan is to put the company’s own unique spin on its physical bookstore in an effort to capture customer loyalty offline.
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“We’ve applied 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping,” explained Jennifer Cast, vice president of Amazon Books, in a letter to customers. “The books in our store are selected based on Amazon.com customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on Goodreads, and our curators’ assessments.”
The store has been designed from the ground up to be different. Books are displayed face-out, rather than spine up. Customers will also find review cards under each title with Amazon.com customer ratings provided. The aim is to create a “store without walls” where thousands of the most popular and buzzed-about titles are immediately available, while a backup of millions more can be accessed directly through Amazon.com.
Amazon Books also has a space carved out where customers can check out the latest Amazon-backed devices. Products available include the Kindle, Fire Tablet, Fire TV and Echo, among others. In-house experts are on hand to answer customer questions.
Located at 4601 26th Ave. NE in Seattle, the new store is a prototype to be sure. How soon, if ever, other locations of Amazon Books will materialize across the country remains to be seen. If the test drive produces more stores, the online retailer will have pulled off the ultimate about-face by entering the old-fashioned physical market it helped topple two decades ago.
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