Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), the online retail giant, will open its first-ever brick-and-mortar retail store in its 20-year life in Seattle on Tuesday.
This full-size, traditional store, named Amazon Books, is a physical extension of Amazon.com with books being selected based on customer ratings and pre-orders on Amazon.com.
The prices will be the same as those offered on the website, Amazon said on Monday.
The shop will stock 5,000 books in the 5,500-sq-ft (510-sq-m) space.
The store will also have an option to test drive Amazon's devices such as Kindle, Echo, Fire TV and Fire Tablet.
Amazon Books will be open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, the company said.
The company chose Seattle for its first physical bookstore because it’s close to Amazon’s headquarters and because Seattle is a top market for readers.
The company has slowly moved into physical retailing by launching lockers and pick-up points where customers can collect their orders, and kiosks where they can buy gadgets such as the Kindle e-reader.
The opening of the store comes a month after Waterstores, the UK book chain, said it would stop selling the Kindle, the Guardian reported. The book chain’s managing director told the newspaper that he had removed Kindles from most of its 280 stores because they were “getting virtually no sales”.
Shares of Amazon eased 0.8% to US$623 each. The stock has more than doubled this year.