Amazon leads the way into the real world as online real estate – once heralded as the next frontier for retail – becomes crowded and expensive
Remember when the future of retail was online? Now it seems that online retailers have decided they can’t get by without bricks and mortar.
Amazon raised eyebrows in November when it opened its first brick and mortar extension – a bookstore in Seattle’s University Village. The online giant’s rise, after all, is blamed for laying waste to independent bookshops across the country.
But Amazon is only among the latest, if largest, e-commerce players to take a stab at traditional retail after starting life online.
“It’s very hard to launch a brand these days that’s just online-only. It’s an incredibly difficult and crowded e-commerce environment,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst at Forrester Research. She noted there are more than 800,000 online stores, all vying to attract customers through the gateway of Google.
Online real estate has become crowded and expensive. Bidding on keywords against the likes of Amazon and large traditional retailers to land on the first page of search results is a costly game.
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Source and acknowledgement: Guardian Business
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