Amazon just opened the doors to its big data brick-and-mortar bookstore in Chicago.
The store, which is located at 3441 N. Southport Ave, uses customer ratings, reviews and data collected from their e-commerce business and Kindle devices to display books that are most likely to entice readers to make a purchase. Amazon’s ecosystem is also heavily present alongside books, with an entire section devoted to Amazon electronics such as the Echo device and Fire tablet. There's also a coffee shop featuring Portland's Stumptown Coffee.
It’s the fifth store of its kind in the US, as Amazon looks to use their extensive data on customers to replicate their e-commerce success in a retail setting.
"We've had 20 years of experience on Amazon.com, and we looked at the data and saw Chicago people love to read and Southport people love to read," said Jennifer Cast, vice president of Amazon Books. "We fell in love with the neighborhood, and we're excited to create a bookstore here for the neighborhood."
Here’s a look inside Amazon’s new Lakeview bookstore.
Big Data Determines Displays
When you first walk in the store, the featured books table isn’t selected by a local employee or organized by latest hyped releases—it’s a selection of Amazon.com’s most highly-rated books (an aggregate rating of 4.8 stars or above).
Amazon's bookstore has just 3,800 titles, compared to the millions of titles in its online store. The books that make it to brick-and-mortar are dictated by data collected by Amazon through its e-commerce business and Goodreads site (a social book review app and website owned by Amazon), as well as an in-house curatorial team that selects highly-rated titles that are of the zeitgeist (a book on Hamilton was placed on the front table) or likely to be of interest to a general audience ("The Book of Joy" by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu was also featured on the highly-rated table).
In addition to traditional sections such as fiction and biography, there are section headers that reflect Amazon's data insights, such as "Books with More than 10,000 Reviews on Amazon.com," "Most-Wished-For Books on Amazon.com," and "Page Turners: Books Kindle Readers Finish in 3 Days or Less." Another section is titled "If You Like..." and offers suggestions for reading based off bestsellers, similar to the "Recommended" feature on their online store.
They dug into local data as well, with displays showing bestselling nonfiction titles from Chicago customers and travel books based on Chicago-area vacation interests.
All the books are front-facing, because they found Amazon's customers prefer to visually browse by cover, and placards posted below books display ratings and excerpts from customers' online reviews.
You're not going to find many bad reviews here however--the average rating of a book in the store is 4.5 stars, Amazon PR representative Deborah Bass assured me.
Amazon Tech Shares the Shelves
While Amazon is positioning this as a bookstore, Amazon's device and e-commerce ecosystem shares the retail spotlight.
About a fourth of the store is devoted to displaying Amazon electronics and compatible devices, including the Amazon Echo, Kindle and Fire tablets. There's also a wall of third-party connected devices that work with the Echo's Alexa Voice System. The kid's section has toys and games for sale, while the cooking section has kettles and blenders displayed next to books on smoothie recipes and tea varieties.
Kindle devices are mounted on shelves, allowing customer to compare the paper-and-ink book with its e-ink counterpart (the kid's section even has a pint sized chair and a green-rubber lined kids Kindle device). There are book scanners scattered throughout the store where customers can compare the list price to the price for Prime members, who pay $10.99 per month for expedited shipping and cheaper prices.
Those with the Amazon app can use the camera widget to scan book covers or bar codes to pull up the book on Amazon.com, to find additional information, Prime pricing, and customer reviews, or to order the book online if they don't want to purchase in-store. They can also use the Amazon app to check out within the store. "It's really about integration of the online and offline, and being able to do that seamlessly," said Bass.
Amazon's Moves in Chicago Don't Please All
Amazon has drawn ire for expanding into brick-and-mortar, especially after bookstores suffered while the company routinely undercut bookseller's prices and offered increasingly fast delivery options for its paying Prime members. When Amazon's Chicago bookstore was first announced, several independent booksellers released a joint statement noting their commitment to helping customers who read "voraciously and eclectically," expressing concerns about Amazon's use of customer data and accusing the e-commerce giant of skirting sales tax in the state, citing a study done by the American Booksellers Association and Civic Economics.
Several booksellers posted statements on social media Tuesday asking customers to continue to support local bookstores, and the Chicago Review of Books posted a blog from author Rebecca Makai titled "12 Chicago Bookstores to Visit Instead of Amazon Today."
Regardless, Cast said that Amazon Books stores have been successful ventures in their current four markets (Seattle, San Diego, Portland and Boston) and they'll continue to expand based on customer demand (they have stores in New York, New Jersey and Bellevue, Washington opening next).
"We realize after 20 years we've got something to add to customer's book shopping experience, using technology and the data we have," she said. "Our goal is to innovate in ways that make the shopping experience better and more efficient, more effective for customers, and that's what we're going to focus on."
Beyond bookstores, Amazon announced several fulfillment centers to the Chicago area over the past two years, most recently two Aurora facilities that would employ 1,000.
Here's a further look inside Amazon's new Lakeview bookstore.
