Born as an online bookseller, Amazon will close its physical bookstores. In total, 66 stores in the United States and two in the United Kingdom will disappear.
Physical bookstores and Amazon, it’s over. The American giant, which made a name for itself as an online bookseller in its early days before largely contributing to the disappearance of many bookstores, has in fact decided to close all its physical bookstores, as well as “4-star” stores. offering the highest rated products from the e-commerce platform, and pop-up stores, according to information from Reuters confirmed by Amazon. In total, 66 stores in the United States and two in the United Kingdom will disappear.
The end of the physical bookstores of the e-commerce and cloud specialist marks a turning point in its physical store strategy. Amazon’s first bookstore opened in Seattle in 2015, and it was the starting point for a slew of retail experiments. The group, now headed by Andy Jassy, notably distinguished itself with the launch of Amazon Go, a high-tech grocery store concept where the customer no longer needs to go to the checkout to pay: cameras and sensors count the products entered by the consumer before automatically debiting the latter from their Amazon account.
Amazon’s brick-and-mortar stores account for just 3% of its revenue
With this “phygital” approach, the American giant wanted to blur the boundaries between online commerce and shopping in physical stores as much as possible to be in constant contact with consumers. But this approach, marked in particular by the acquisition of the organic supermarket chain Whole Foods Market in 2017 for 13.7 billion dollars, has not achieved the same success as other lines of business, such as the cloud. The group’s revenues from its physical stores thus weighed only 3% of the $ 137.4 billion in sales generated by Amazon over the last three months of 2021.
However, if the Seattle octopus closes its bookstores, this does not mean that it gives up its ambitions in physical commerce. Quite the contrary. Amazon also announced in January the opening later this year in Los Angeles of a high-tech clothing store, called Amazon Style, where the customer will be guided by algorithms. In parallel, the American group plans to continue the development of its “Just Walk Out” cashless store technology, similar to that used in its Amazon Go stores, and to focus its efforts on its Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods Market, Amazon Go and Amazon Style. In the first three months of 2022, Amazon is targeting revenues of between 112 and 117 billion dollars.