Conducted for nearly seven years, the experiment attempted by Amazon to sell books in “hard” bookstores in the United States has not been sufficiently conclusive or profitable and will stop. The e-commerce giant confirmed on Thursday March 3 that 66 of its US stores and two of its UK stores will close, as revealed by Reuters. This decision concerns 24 “physical” bookstores in the United States, knowing that California was the best-endowed state, with seven points of sale.
Also in the sights are several pop-up stores as well as Amazon 4-Star stores which marketed an eclectic selection of products, all of which were highly rated by customers. Amazon did not specify how many jobs would be cut.
The group, however, retains its other stores, i.e. its chain of organic supermarkets Whole Foods Market, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go and Amazon Style stores, said a spokesperson. In total, revenues from its “hard” stores represented barely 3% of the 137 billion dollars (125.2 billion euros) in turnover achieved by Amazon in the last quarter of 2021, and they were due in very large portion at Whole Foods.
Amazon, the world’s largest online bookseller, opened its first physical bookstore, Amazon Books, in Seattle on November 3, 2015, where its headquarters are located. The group assured then that it would be “a physical extension of Amazon.com [qui] combines the advantages of buying books online and in stores”. Drawing from the group’s gigantic wealth of information to select books according to customer ratings posted on the platform, these shops that had then sprung up all over the United States offered for sale what people read, so mostly bestsellers.
“Retail is difficult”
This variation was also supposed to complete the arrival of Amazon in self-publishing with the creation of Amazon Publishing, in order to offer titles in stores that other booksellers refused. Due to the obvious lack of profitability in stores, these self-published titles were quickly confined to online sales.
The war of booksellers announced itself in 2015 as a battle of titans. Amazon Books risked competing head-on with the major bookstore chains across the Atlantic and many observers feared the disappearance of players as important as Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million. The conflicts between booksellers and Amazon were multiple, even before Amazon opened its stores – between the question of the price of the digital book, the model for sharing the value of the book, the commercial negotiations, or the increasing weight essential for Amazon in the sale of books on the Internet…
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