Amazon dominates online retail, but it looks as though that's just the start of Jeff Bezos' shopping plans. Amazon is getting physical. There's already physical book stores popping up carrying the Amazon name, and grocery stores are also in the works, so what next? Home appliances, furniture, and electronics stores, apparently.
The New York Times reports that Amazon is exploring a range of other ideas for physical stores, with two in particular highlighted as being ongoing experiments.
The first is a store selling home appliances and/or furniture. For consumers, it's desirable to travel and view such items because it's very difficult to answer two important questions when viewing them online: is it comfortable? and will it fit?
To solve that problem and answer those questions, Amazon is experimenting with a physical store, but with a twist. Rather than a massive store packed full of products to wander around looking at, Amazon would provide a virtual reality or augmented reality experience. So you could view large items such as a refrigerator or table and chairs, but without them having to physically be there.
Such a setup would not only allow for a huge range of products to be viewable in a relatively small retail space, it also opens the door for choosing and viewing options such as colors and optional extras. They would also get a lot more use than Facebook's failed attempt at adding VR demo stations to hundreds of Best Buy stores, or their Denver airport experiment.
The second experimental store is focused on electronics, and in particular a physical store to rival the Apple and Microsoft stores. Amazon offers a range of own-branded electronics including the Kindle, Fire tablets, and Echo. A physical store focused on selling such devices along with a range of accessories is possible. It seems likely Amazon would want to compete with Apple and Microsoft in other areas too, such as laptops, desktop PCs, and smartphones, even if they are provided by other companies.
For now, Amazon is carrying out experiments, none of which could end up becoming real stores. But the fact Amazon is even thinking about this shows there's a need, and that even with the growing popularity of shopping online the physical store is far from disappearing completely.