We visited Amazon's first neighborhood bookstore and saw how it could change the industry for good
In case you missed it, Amazon.com, the world's largest online bookseller, has been opening brick-and-mortar stores over the past few years, with the newest opening this week in Chicago's upscale Lakeview neighborhood.
- Part bookstore, part electronics store, part coffee shop, the Chicago location is Amazon's first physical store in the Midwest and the first not in a shopping mall.
- Amazon is trying to take advantage of millions of Amazon.com customer ratings and reviews and use its big data to offer in-store customers new ways to discover and purchase popular books, both physical and digital.
- The average book rating is 4.5 out of 5.
- Although Amazon.com is a digital behemoth, online sales still account for just 8% of all retail sales in the US. A physical store with a human touch could prove to be a smart strategy as it gives customers an opportunity to engage with the brand.
"We started out as an online bookstore 20 years ago - we were founded as a bookstore and we are passionate readers and book lovers," Jennifer Cast, a vice president at Amazon Books, told Business Insider.
"We also realized we had an opportunity to create a new kind of store and create a different experience in a physical world. Our special sauce is knowing the reading habits and passions of a city through our Amazon.com data."
Here's what we saw on our tour of Amazon's new bookstore, and how the company's new clicks-and-mortar strategy could influence the way many people buy books.