Will Amazon 4-Star live up to its reviews?

After learning that Amazon might open up to 3,000 Go stores by 2021, the industry was still catching its collective breath when the retail behemoth opened an entirely new format in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood last week. Amazon 4-Star is the latest move into physical retail on the part of the once online-only retailer, joining Amazon Books and Whole Foods. If this keeps up, some might start to wonder whether the retail apocalypse narrative may not be entirely accurate (indeed, sarcasm is my superpower).

Just about anything Amazon does tends to be of keen interest and can often send shockwaves throughout the sector. Not only is the company often several steps ahead of the competition, but it possesses the culture and the spending capacity to try a lot of stuff and keep everyone on their toes, desperately trying to figure out what’s next. So at this point it’s anyone’s guess where this particular experiment could lead over time. Yet the idea behind this new concept, along with what I have observed in visiting Amazon’s growing fleet of bookstores, so far leaves me unimpressed.

The organizing principle of 4-Star seems similar to Amazon’s foray into physical book stores: edit down a vastly larger online assortment to a core of mostly “greatest hits” (best sellers, customer favorites and new & trending), add some cool technology, and layer on some of that omni-channel stuff we’ve all heard so much about. At one level, this seems eminently sensible. If we already know what the customer buys online, surely translating that to a physical store is not only the “right” product strategy, but will lead to excellent productivity. Unfortunately this left-brain driven translation from the digital world to brick and mortar can often be underwhelming. There are a few reasons for this.

Shopping online just isn’t the same as shopping in a store.

While e-commerce works well when we are on a mission, it’s not as good when we are engaged in discovery. Most websites are optimized for speed and conversion. Conversely, a really good brick-and-mortar experience can deliver an entirely different customer journey by leveraging displays, product adjacencies, sight lines to neighboring departments, in-person sales assistance, etc. Category management strategies that ultimately determine a brand’s success play out in fundamentally different ways in a physical store. The ability to see, touch and/or try on products requires that assortment strategies be tailored to the unique dynamics of a store shopping experience.

Optimizing our way to boring.

Best sellers, by definition, are what some comparatively mass audience has already voted on; the peak of the bell curve, not the extremes. Any student of retail knows what great merchants have done for centuries to create competitive differentiation and maximize long-term productivity — namely they curate an interesting combination of what already works along with offering up interesting items that add to the overall experience, supported by loss leaders that help spur traffic and complementary items that drive up basket size. Heavy reliance on carrying only the most popular items inevitably causes a regression to the mean, which can easily make for rather boring and/or disjointed stores.

Be careful what you wish for.

Among the many dumb things Sears has done over the years, there were two whoppers that speak to my thesis that I was also “blessed” to witness firsthand. The first happened some 15 years ago when the financial types started to have more influence than the merchants and store operators. This led to an initiative to improve our sagging financial performance where the driving logic was essentially to keep the best sellers and eliminate (or shrink) the products with below average financial performance. While mathematically that sounds appealing, back in the real world it had the effect of lowering traffic and reducing conversion as it made our stores even less customer relevant, while also ignoring the key ingredients to building profitable market-baskets and creating customer lifetime value.

The other little oopsy daisy came a year or so later when we acquired Lands’ End and were rolling out its product to hundreds of Sears stores. The Lands’ End merchants insisted that virtually all of their direct-to-consumer best sellers had to be included in the new Sears’ retail assortment. When translated to carrying a basic depth and breadth of sizes and colors the resulting offering not only didn’t make much sense in the context of other products we carried, it led to inventory levels that had no chance of being productive. But hey, what’s a few hundred million dollars of markdowns among friends?

The lesson, of course, is that a remarkable retail experience should be built from the customer’s perspective, be competitively unique and be mindful of leveraging the unique characteristics that only a physical store can deliver. Digital can be hugely important in informing the brick and mortar execution, but should not overwhelm the overall experience design..

In Amazon’s case, more times than not, it plays by a different set of rules, some of which other retailers would be wise to emulate, others that the competition can only dream about. Amazon’s 4-Star may turn out to be this generation’s Service Merchandise. More likely, however, it is the first of many iterations and merely the tip of the iceberg in a broader and more aggressive move into physical retail.

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.

On October 16th I’ll be in San Antonio delivering the opening keynote at X/SPECS . November 8th I’ll kick of the eRetailerSummit in Chicago.

For more info on my speaking and workshops go here.

Originally published at stevenpdennis.com on October 7, 2018.