Amazon develops new retail formula

With their chain of shops, Amazon Books, the company returns to its roots and wants to turn the bookmarket upside down again by smart use of data.

A shop that offers only a limited number of books sounds rather strange, but it´s not a bad idea. The unique selling point of a local outlet isn´t about delivering a wide range of books: it is always very difficult to compete with an online shop such as Amazon with next day delivery.

Amazon Books offers quality not quantity. A shop will only offer that which is most popular in its area. The selection is based on big data analysis from the website and only books with a ranking of 4.6 (out of 5) or higher will be presented.

The power of the shop is in the weakness of the online shop: lack of surprise. The person who already knows what book he wants just types it into Google, but encountering new titles is more complicated. The shop is meant to find new treasures which you didn´t know existed.
Remarkable in Amazon Books is that all covers are facing the customer. This is the result of offline A/B testing. An Amazon employee told Fastcodesign how they invited a group of people to a big space and were they were guided through a number of lay-outs. The lay-out with the covers facing the customer was by far the most popular.

The shop tries to close the gap with online. The books have a card with customer reviews and those with an Amazon app can get more information about the book. If the book is not in stock, it can be requested at one of the information panels. The shop will also stock other products from the startup platform Amazon Launchpad.

Although the shop is in fact another sales channel, we think that perhaps attracting attention to Amazon Prime might be behind the idea. Bezos has said more than once that a subscription model of 99 Euros a year (with discounts on books and other products) is how they want to grow the company quickly. Prime is said to have between 60 to 70 million subscribers in the US and may be saturating, which makes the case for a new client group. The shop might be an option to get to know this new group.