Amazon turned “showrooming” into a dirty word in
retail. Now, the company is making showrooming work in its bricks-and-mortar
bookstore, according to author and strategist Frank Catalano in an article for GeekWire.
Catalano visited the Amazon Books store in Seattle and
discovered a lot to like. He found a comfortable store that made running across
something new to read easier then the Amazon online recommendation engine. Prices
were the same as listed online, despite signs that showed books at full publisher
list price, and Amazon’s ratings and excerpts from reviews were easy to locate.
“The genius is that Amazon has neatly knocked down the
virtual walls between online and physical retailing, carefully bringing online
content and transactional expertise to what already works in in-person
shopping,” Catalano wrote. “It just happens to be a bookstore.”
Reports have also surfaced about a pilot that places
display stands of e-book-specific Amazon gift cards in drugstores in Washington
state. The cards can be redeemed for the e-book on the card or turned into
general-purpose store credit.
“It
seems clear Amazon’s brick-and-mortar ambitions are only beginning,” Chris
Meadows wrote in an article for TeleRead. “And if bookstores thought it was bad when they only had to
compete with the online version of the site, something tells me their problems
are just about to get a whole lot worse.”
