IO Directory 2016

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Editor’s Le tte r
Martin Vilaboy
Editor-in-Chief
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Percy Zamora
Art Director
outdoor@bekapublishing.com
Ernest Shiwanov
Editor at Large
ernest@bekapublishing.com
Berge Kaprelian
Group Publisher
berge@bekapublishing.com
Rene Galan
Account Executive
rene@bekapublishing.com
Jennifer Vilaboy
Production Director
jen@bekapublishing.com
Beka Publishing
Berge Kaprelian
President and CEO
Neil Ende
General Counsel
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Business Accounting
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Reproduction in whole or in any form or
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Amazon Gets Physical
Last November, Amazon opened its first permanent brick-and-mortar
bookstore – complete with a brick façade – located in an upscale shopping
center in Seattle. In and of itself, the somewhat modest opening would seem
to have little significance to outdoor specialty retailers, as well as specialty
dealers in other verticals.
Not so fast, say analysts at Outcalt & Johnson: Retail Strategist LLC. Their
recommendation to specialty retailers: Brace yourself.
“In our view, what Amazon has launched is a new kind of category killer
in a specialty store footprint,” they warn.
Following the Seattle store opening, Outcalt & Johnson anticipates an
“onslaught of entire shopping centers of Amazon specialty retail stores,” from
apparel and electronics to sporting goods and kitchenware. Now sure, Amazon,
as the “Earth’s biggest store,” may not understand the small nuances of each
individual specialty segment, and experience certainly is a competitive ad-
vantage. But with 20-plus years of customer data to draw from, Amazon does
know customers, and Outcalt & Johnson expects Amazon to apply the same
data-centric efficiencies its testing at its just-opened bricks-and-mortar book-
store to other specialty segments. The upshot is a shopping center full
of separate Amazon specialty stores in categories specifically tailored to the
customers in that particular market.
Consider for a moment some of the capabilities Amazon has brought
to its brick-and-mortar operation, as pointed out by Outcalt & Johnson.
First, it is highly data centric. The books carried, Amazon says, “are select-
ed based on customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on
Goodreads and our curators’ assessments.” It’s also hyper-local. Amazon
is using its vast storehouse of data to offer only the best-turning inventory
to a targeted, localized market.
Secondly, Amazon has inoculated itself from online price competition,
as all prices in the store are the same as on And pricing is
dynamic. What is $15.99 today could be $16.25 tomorrow, depending on
what the market determines. “That’s marketplace dynamics in action,” says
Outcalt & Johnson.
Thirdly, the Amazon store will constantly gather even more customer data.
No prices are displayed at Amazon Books. Want to know the price? Scan the
barcode below each book, and be sure to do so with your Amazon app for con-
venience, of course.
It’s all part of Amazon’s pursuit of turning “the art of retailing into the
science of retailing,” and it’s a change that consumers say they want to
experience. We’ve seen Amazon do it once before in the world of e-commerce.
If the online giant is successful in its brick-and-mortar efforts, it could mean
that customer data and data analytics technologies become as central to spe-
cialty retail tech investment as e-commerce platforms and even POS systems
have been up to this point.
Indeed, the power of customer data has been unleashed in Seattle.
–MV
Inside Outdoor | Winter 2016 6