Comment Shops - Showrooms (Score 3, Interesting) 725
Are we part way through a transition from shops being where you both browse / research products and purchase them, to separating these two phases of the shopping process.
The way I see it there is still a need for bricks & morter 'showrooms' where you can go and compare products side-by-side or even try them out in real life : e.g when buying a netbook / laptop, I always go to the local PC world or similar to try out the different keyboards and see how the displays look.
However to make the purchase, it is clearly more efficient and therefore cheaper to sell through either giant mail-order only warehouses (e.g. order from amazon, or order direct from the manufacturer) or something like Argos for when you want to be able to collect it yourself same-day.
The problem is how the showrooms get payed for? will we move instead to individual manfactures paying for showpiece storefronts (maybe Apple stores already are this? do they expect to make a profit on on-store sales, or are they just giant adverts driving their sales through other channels?)
The current middle-ground that retailers seem to be using is the online 'reserve and collect' - but they still tend to be keeping the much of their stock on the shelves rather than having it all more efficiently stacked away in a warehouse out the back.