By Tian DuBelko
Amazon Books is bringing its brick-and-mortar bookstore to Bellevue Square this fall.
This will be the 10th physical bookstore for Amazon, the Seattle-based tech giant. According to building permits discovered by Recode, the downtown Bellevue Square location will open in later 2017.
The Bellevue Square store is the second such brick-and-mortar bookstore to launch in the Greater Seattle Area, with Amazon opening its first-ever physical bookstore at Seattle’s University Village in 2015. According to Amazon’s site, the Bellevue Square store is one of the six stores that is “coming soon.”
A new take on brick-and-mortar
Just as it reinvented the online retailer market, Amazon now appears to be venturing into physical, brick-and-mortar retail. Last December, an Amazon grocery store opened in downtown Seattle and allowed customers to shop without needing to go through a checkout line. And just in March, two AmazonFresh pickup locations opened in Ballard and SoDo.
Even as Amazon embraces the traditional brick-and-mortar approach, their commitment to staying a “Day 1” company is evident. Focusing on customer outcomes is what made Amazon their name, and that approach can be seen in their take on the basic brick-and-mortar bookstore.
When the online experience meets a physical store space
To optimize their bookstore and to cater to their users’ needs, Amazon uses online data such as customer and book popularity to suggest books for its readers. “We select books based on Amazon.com customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on Goodreads, and our curators’ assessments,” their website writes. And the books are presented like how they are online — with their covers facing out.
The Bellevue Square store, like other stores, will also function as a showcase for Amazon’s digital products. These include the Echos, Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, and Fire TV media-streaming devices.
