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> because it had effectively become a “showroom” for Internet retailers—people would see books in the store and then buy them online. I think there might be ro
by kybernetikos 13y ago
> because it had effectively become a “showroom” for Internet retailers—people would see books in the store and then buy them online.
I think there might be room for some retail outlets to embrace this. You could imagine a bookshop that was an amazon affiliate, stuck QR codes with their affiliate link to the book over all of the barcodes, had a nice cafe and environment for browsing the large numbers of books they have in stock, but don't actually sell any themselves. They could even arrange to be close to an amazon drop/warehouse so you could get things delivered super fast to the store itself for a small convenience fee.
- harpastum 13y agoAmazon is partially targeting this using its Amazon Source program: https://source.amazon.com/#/welcome https://source.amazon.com/#/welcome . At this point it's only for kindle books (not physically shipping), but booksellers get paid for ebooks that customers buy.
- pyoung 13y agoHmm, seems like this could be useful for more than just books. I bought some camping gear from amazon, and I recall that my biggest hesitation was not being able to evaluate the physical product, and therefore unsure of the construction quality. The Amazon reviews help a lot, but I was still left with some uncertainty. Realistically, the amazon income is much too small for a business to be viable. I think the commissions are around 5-10%, whereas the traditional retail markup is around 50%. Seems like there is too big of a gap there to make things work, even if using this business model resulted in lower storage and stocking costs for the retail outfit.