14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon is taking its business from the online to the offline. The company seems to be on the lookout for a new location for its first brick-and-mortar outlet.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon will experiment on delivering a face-to-face experience to its ecommerce business. It seems that the company wants the new place to be ready in time for the holiday shopping frenzy and it won’t be taking over just any space, but one straight in the middle of New York City, right down the road from the famous Macy’s.
This is, obviously, a location that gets a lot of foot traffic, which should be quite beneficial for Amazon. It should be interesting to see just how Amazon wants to pull this off, especially since its experience is more with the behind the scenes portion of the shopping experience, rather than the front row action.
Amazon has managed to build its business on competitive pricing and fast shipping, taking on just other similar online stores, while also doing quite a bit of damage to traditional stores. Now, it will be facing these head on, diminishing its reliance on couriers at least for New York.
Right across from the Empire State Building
The company has set its eyes on the space at 7 West 34th Street, which is across from the Empire State Building. The place would function as a mini warehouse, with limited inventory for same-day delivery in New York, as well as product returns and exchanges and pickups of online orders.
Of course, given the number of products available on Amazon, it would be impossible to put them all under a single roof. Basically, it’s all still going to rely heavily on the online store, but it will be easier to pick up or replace things especially when you can’t just sit around and wait for a delivery since time is of the essence around the holiday season.
There’s also the chance that the company will have several of its own products on display, such as Kindle e-readers, tablets, the Fire smartphone or the set-top boxes, for instance.
If Amazon’s new project proves to be sustainable and everything goes well, we could soon see more of these brick-and-mortar shops show up around the United States and maybe even abroad. It should also be interesting to see how the public will react to the existence of a physical location for a store they’ve only known online for the past decades.