Bloomberg Technology: Amazon tries to get physical

Amazon tries to get physical   
Bloomberg Technology
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Hi, everyone. It's Shira. It was big news on Wednesday when Walmart Inc. agreed to buy most of Flipkart, India's leading e-commerce company. Another online shopping king made a move that showed the importance of trying and buying in the real world.

Amazon.com Inc. said Wednesday that it has started to open "experience centers" in model homes to give people a taste of life intertwined with Amazon gadgets and services.

The company wants you to walk into a demonstration house and ask Amazon's Alexa digital assistant who's at the front door, stream Amazon Music on an Amazon Echo speaker, re-order toilet paper with an Amazon Dash button and book an appointment via Amazon Home Services with a contractor who will clean the gutters. It's a glimpse at homeowner heaven, or Amazon's version of it.

It's hard to imagine huge numbers of people will become Amazon domestic devotees after seeing these demos. But the effort is more evidence of Amazon's move from the digital domain into the physical world to keep expanding its hold on consumers' wallets.

Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods supermarkets, its growing chain of bookstores, its string of university outposts, its experiment with a convenience store, its gadget kiosks in malls and its mini-stores inside some Kohl's department stores are further evidence that Amazon is trying to meet the shopping masses where they are today, in the physical stores where 90 percent of U.S. retail sales take place.

Sure, there are some categories of shopping that the internet has taken over -- book buying and consumer electronics, for example, mostly thanks to Amazon and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos. But there are many huge categories such as cars, appliances and groceries that people still buy nearly entirely in stores.

Amazon also announced Wednesday a partnership that lets people buy car tires on its website and have them delivered and installed at some Sears Holdings Corp. auto centers. It's another example of how Amazon is trying to stretch into product areas that have been almost entirely immune to e-commerce.

Devices and internet services for the home particularly need a personal touch. As internet-connected appliances, thermostats, home-security and entertainment systems become more sophisticated, people need help in person to figure out how to install them, connect them to other gadgets in the home and get educated on how and why they should stitch them into their domestic routines. Amazon knows this, and that's why it's trying the gadget-filled demo homes, and why Amazon home devices get prominent play in Amazon's bookstores and its mall pop-up stores.

The future of shopping is going to be a mix of physical stores, online shopping and hybrids. Conventional retailers are trying to prepare for this future by learning new tricks in cyberspace, as Walmart's Flipkart acquisition shows. But Amazon is just as much in learning mode to figure out the rhythms of the vast majority of people who want the brick-and-mortar experience. --Shira Ovide


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