NEW YORK --Amazon.com Inc. plans to open a store in New York City, people familiar with the plans told The Wall Street Journal, the first brick-and-mortar outlet in its 20-year history and an experiment to provide the type of face-to-face experience found at traditional retailers.
The site, set to open in time for the holiday-shopping season on the same busy street as Macy's Inc.'s flagship store, would mark an attempt by Amazon to connect with customers in the physical world. Amazon has built its business on competitive pricing and fast shipping. Until now, though, it couldn't compete with the immediacy of a traditional store, said the report.
Amazon's space would function as a mini warehouse, with limited inventory for same-day delivery within New York, product returns and exchanges and pickups of online orders, the report said. The Manhattan location is meant primarily to be a place for customers to pick up orders they've made online, but will also serve as a distribution center for couriers and likely one day will feature Amazon devices like Kindle e-readers, Fire smartphones and Fire TV set-top boxes, according to people familiar with the company's thinking.
Opening a physical location is "about marketing the Amazon brand," Matt Nemer, a Wells Fargo analyst, told the newspaper. "Same-day delivery, ordering online and picking up in store are ideas that are really catching on. Amazon needs to be at the center of that."
Seattle-based Amazon has experimented with physical stores before, said the report, including pop-up shops and locations run by subsidiaries. Last November, Kindle-brand pop-ups appeared in U.S. malls, selling e-readers and tablets from vending machines. Its Zappos unit has a store near its Kentucky distribution center and once operated a few outlets in its hometown of Las Vegas; and its Quidsi unit runs a cosmetics store in Manhasset, N.Y.
Amazon also has set up large metal lockers in convenience stores--including 7-Eleven--and parking garages around the country, to accommodate deliveries and returns. The lockers don't offer same-day delivery, however. The lockers have been a popular option, and Amazon has expanded them to a number of cities, including overseas, after initially just offering them in Seattle.
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