What Happened
Amazon may be responsible for the demise of traditional bookstores, but that certainly won’t stop the ecommerce giant from opening one itself. The company that first started as an online bookseller has opened its first ever physical retail store – a bookstore, to be exact – in Seattle’s University Village on Tuesday.
Unlike other brick-and-mortar bookstores that typically categorize books by genre, the store will be relying on Amazon’s existing data — including customer ratings, sales totals, and Goodread popularity — to decide which books to stock and how to display them in store. In addition to books, Amazon is also setting aside a section of the store to its hardware products such as the Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet.
What Retailers Need To Do
Amazon’s physical bookstore showcases an interesting example for retail brands to take advantage of the data it gathers from online shoppers and use it to optimize the offline shopping experience. Visiting physical retail stores also allows customers to browse at leisure rather than searching for specific items, encouraging the kind of serendipitous buying that is rare in ecommerce. With some ecommerce brands dipping their toes into the brick-and-mortar space, it is key for retailers to bridge the gap between online and offline shopping with user data.
Source: The Verge
