2008-11-20

Chapters

has earned the unfortunate honour of being nothing more than a physical, browsable storefront for amazon.ca.

I was in recently to wander amongst the stacks, when I picked this up:
Book from Chapters

Looks tasty, but 55$? Out comes the iPhone...
Amazon.ca mobile

You can order straight from the iPhone-optimized website; my stuff should be delivered to the office by Friday. The sad thing for Chapters is that I really don't see how they can effectively compete here. Amazon, with no physical locations (that Chapters location at the corner of Rideau and Sussex has got to be pricy) and massive economies of scale, will always have lower overhead and be able to compete on price, so only shipping costs and delays can hurt them here, and I'm willing to wait 5 days for cookbooks.

I suppose the sensible thing for the brick-and-mortar player in this race is to attempt to provide a better experience, but if you're selling books, I don't really see how you could do that... Ideas?