At first glance, it might seem at least a bit ironic that Amazon would be shuttering bookstores.
The eCommerce giant, after all, depending on who’s making the observation, has been charged with pretty much killing the brick-and-mortar bookstore. And of course Amazon began life as an online book retailer.
On Wednesday (March 2), Reuters reported that the company will close dozens of bookstores and other brick-and-mortar retail locations in a bid to train efforts more fully on grocery and fashion. All told, the company will close all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, pop-ups and shops that sell a variety of home goods. The shops are located in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Whole Foods and Fashion
The grocery push, of course, comes in the wake of the company’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods, and as far as fashion is concerned, Amazon Style offers a combination of brick-and-mortar and virtual channels combined in on-site retail.
See also: Amazon Opening Fashion Store with Digital Fitting Rooms
While brick-and-mortar was and is a relatively small part of the company’s top line, the segment has been growing by double digits. In the company’s fourth quarter, Amazon’s brick-and-mortar store sales, which include Whole Foods Market, rose 16% on an FX adjusted basis to $4.7 billion (online sales were $66 billion in the same period).
The aforementioned closures of the bookshops and the retail locations would still leave Amazon with a bit of physical footprint. At the end of the most recent period the company had more than 500 Whole Foods Markets, and roughly two dozen, each, of its Amazon Fresh grocery stores and Amazon Go convenience stores in its pantheon.
Amazon’s omnichannel efforts were detailed in this space late last year; the company had in recent months been unveiling new set of services — through Amazon Local Selling — allowing retailers to offer in-store pickup to local customers.
The news this week, however, trains a spotlight on the fact that the vast majority of sales — roughly about 80% — are still done in physical settings.
In fact, recent PYMNTS research has found that 8 out of 10 shoppers prefer to purchase grocery products and pharmaceutical products in physical stores. Just 18% of consumers make grocery purchases mainly online, while 22% make pharmacy purchases predominantly online.
Read more: Amazon Pushing More Aggressively to Develop Omnichannel Capabilities
The fact that the lines of commerce are ever-blurred can be seen, too, with Walmart’s own separate efforts announced the same day as the Amazon shutterings.
Walmart launched Choose My Model, a virtual tool powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence, on the company’s website and app that allows shoppers to pick a person who resembles their height, shape and skin tone to show how clothes would fit.
Read also: Walmart’s Choose My Model Helps Shoppers Try on Clothes Virtually
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