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from the brick-and-mortar-comes-full-circle dept.
After years of slowly killing off its traditional bookstore competition, Amazon has opened its first physical bookstore at 4601 26th Ave NE, Seattle, WA:
Amazon is opening a bookshop in Seattle in a move it described as a "physical extension" of its business. It will stock the most popular books from Amazon.com, and the prices will be the same as those offered on the website. Customers will also be able to try out Amazon's devices, including the Kindle and its Fire TV. One expert questioned how much impact such a shop would have.
Amazon Books vice-president Jennifer Cast announced the online giant would open its "real, wooden doors" at the Seattle University Village on 3 November. "Amazon Books is a physical extension of Amazon.com. We've applied 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping," she said. The shop will stock 5,000 books in the 5,500-sq-ft (510-sq-m) space, with the majority chosen on the basis of customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on reader recommendation site Goodreads, and the shop's curators' assessments.
The BBC article shows an online customer review displayed alongside one of the books, along with a shelf featuring books rated "4.8 stars or higher".
From The Seattle Times:
Amazon is betting that the troves of data it generates from shopping patterns on its website will give it advantages in its retail location that other bookstores can't match. It will use data to pick titles that will most appeal to Seattle shoppers.
And that could also solve the business problem that has long plagued other bookstores: unsold books that gather dust on shelves and get sent back to publishers. More than most book retailers, Amazon has deep insight into customer buying habits and can stock its store with titles most likely to move.
The company will stock best-sellers, of course. But it will also include books that get the highest ratings from its customers, including little-known titles. The store will also include such categories as "Most Wished-For Cookbooks." Another section features "Award Winners, 4.5 Stars & Above, Age 6-12."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:11PM
Amazon might as well go into brick-and-mortar retail, because their price advantage in books has been wiped out in the past few years. Publishers have increased the cover prices of their books by a substantial amount over the past few years so that they can give the expected 25-40% online discount. Net prices have been going up. I call this the "Dover effect" (as I've said in past posts) because Dover was late to price in steep discounts, and made up for it a few years ago by dramatically increasing the cover price of their books. All things are now pretty much equal with all retailers offering the same discount more or less. Amazon is a victim of their own success in this regard, because the inefficiencies they exploited in the past are gone from the retail chain. (Amazon's discounts and pricing advantage were always illusory. When Amazon started, they offered a 20% discount from cover price and what amounted to a 10% shipping surcharge, while Barnes and Noble had a 10% store discount for members.)
I have no idea what Amazon is trying to do. Inventory is about 6k books, which is the level of a Waldenbooks or B Daltons, and both of them are out of business now. Barnes and Noble stores have around 20k titles.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:32PM
It could be Kindle Fire Phone bad. But we will see. Maybe starting to show profit made them yearn for the simpler, good old days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:27PM
I used to LOVE getting the Dover catalog in the mail. This would have been late 80s and into the 90s. The books were awesome and the prices were outstanding. Then, one day I noticed that the prices were much more than before. I don't even know if they put out the catalog anymore.