Amazon moves back to the future of traditional book-shopping

pic: Amazon via The Atlantic   

With the benefit of a 20 year online head-start, and discovering the world's most popular books, Amazon are now capitalising on their insight via yesterday's opening of their first brick & mortar bookstore in Seattle.

Being Amazon, key disrupting innovations include:

• Inventory: 6,000 titles (Amazons top selling online books), vs the over-crowded inventory of traditional book-stores
• Merchandising: Books are displayed face-out to maximise appeal (at last, publishers' cover designs get an onshelf-viewing, a step forward from spine-displays of traditional booksellers)
• Product information: under each book is a review card with the Amazon.com customer rating and a review
• Availability: Online access to every book in print, most deliverable in hours... Compare with '...two weeks, Sir, if the wholesaler has it in stock?'
• Freed-up space instore: Opportunity to hang out, or according to The Atlantic: Amazon Books is trying to be a place of community - a place where people will meet and hang out. A place that celebrates both introspection and extroversion. A place much like Apple’s buzzing, light-flooded, free-wifi-enabled temples - only with the tech gadgets on display being, for the most part, books.
• Scaleability: an unlimited selection of closed-down shops...need I say more?

Where next?
Given the inevitability of revolutionising retail book-selling, again, think specialist-shops in most worthwhile categories, given the Amazon insight, like toys, for a start.

Action: Why not try a what-if re your category, and hopefully gain some time?

Amplify: How about the benefits of a 'group-think' by sharing the above?