Booksellers blur the lines between eComm and offline
By Peter | November 4th, 2009
The world of retail book-selling is developing into one of the biggest front lines in the battle between offline and online commerce. Like with any product, eCommerce book retailers face some challenges and hold some advantages versus offline retailers. On the one hand, many customers prefer to touch and look at a book before they purchase it. But on the other hand, many other people are more than happy to buy books site-unseen from Amazon and the like, based purely on word-of-mouth and professional and customer reviews. Throw eBooks into the mix, and its clear that the fate of offline book retailers is a huge question mark.
And it’s this growing threat that prompted a large offline book seller, Borders, to begin offering free shipping on any product that is out-of-stock in one of their retail outlets. So if a customer goes in looking for the latest bestseller, and can’t find it on the shelf, they’ll ship a copy to that customer for free. On the surface, this new service doesn’t seem like that big a deal. But it does mark an interesting new way that brick and mortar retailers can start to blur the line between their own operations and eComm.
There are any number of advantages to shopping online, but one of the big ones is that a customer rarely has to worry about a product being out of stock. With this new offer, Borders is looking to mitigate this advantage from its online competition. They’re clearly hoping that an increasing number of customers will choose to visit their store, flip through a few books, then buy them, either on the spot or for future delivery.
Another interesting battle in this war is the combining of offline retail with eBook purchases. America’s largest offline book retailer, Barnes and Noble, has recently come out with their own Kindle competitor, the Nook. When a Nook owner visits a Barnes and Noble store, they have the option of browsing their eBook catalog while in the store, and downloading any books that interest them. Or, in a more line-blurring possibility, that customer could flip through a paper copy of the book in-store, then purchase it as an eBook at the push of a button.
There’s no doubt that offline book retailers will have to adapt to survive. And maybe evolving won’t be enough to save them. But what is clear is that those same brick and mortar bookstores are turning to the eComm business model for some ideas on how to better serve their customers, and possibly prolong their own existence.
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Tags: Barnes and Noble, Borders, eCommerce
