New York's iconic Herald Square houses the flagship Macy's department store and the Empire State Building, but this holiday season the historic landmarks will share 34th Street with Amazon's first brick-and-mortar store.
The online retailer will experiment with its first physical location across the street from the Empire State Building, according to The Wall Street Journal. The store will act as a mini-warehouse, providing limited inventory for same-day delivery in New York, product returns and exchanges, and pickups of online orders.
Amazon has not released specific details on what products the store will provide. It may showcase its brand inventory such as the Kindle e-readers, Fire smartphone or Fire TV set-top box, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The store is "about marketing the Amazon brand," Matt Nemer, a Wells Fargo analyst, told The Wall Street Journal. "Same-day delivery, ordering online and picking up in store are ideas that are really catching on. Amazon needs to be at the center of that."
Amazon's experiment could end after this holiday season if the store isn't a success. The e-commerce site could open more locations across the country if the New York location works.
The company toyed with opening up a brick-and-mortar store near its Seattle headquarters in 2012 after seeing the success of Apple's retail stores. The Seattle location would have featured Amazon's Kindle products, but the project soon fell apart.
Amazon did open Kindle-brand pop-up locations in U.S. malls where customers could purchase e-readers and tablets through vending machines, according to The Wall Street Journal. It also installed large metal lockers in metropolitan areas for customers to pick-up or return products using a code to access the lockers' cabinets.
