Amazon Furthers Embrace of SMBs with Storefronts

In my hometown of San Luis Obispo, California, there used to be a handful of local bookstores that were fixtures in the community. In my youth, I spent many hours wandering the aisles of Leon’s Books and The Novel Experience on Higuera Street, the main drag, back when that was a thing one did.I’m glad to say that many small businesses on Higuera Street are still thriving, this despite an influx of large brands like H&M, Sephora, and Victoria’s Secret that has homogenized the neighborhood somewhat. Amongst these big brand stores, one can still find plenty of small furniture shops, cafes, restaurants, eyeglass retailers, and the like, all of which are testament to a strong local economy well supported by loyal customers who consider small businesses to be a part of San Luis Obispo’s distinctive character.But the bookstores, most of them, are gone. (Here’s to Phoenix Books, the last used bookstore in town, still hanging on somehow!) Barnes & Noble moved in and did a lot of the damage, and then Amazon, as it did with so many independent booksellers in the 1990s and 2000s, sealed the fate of Leon’s and the rest by offering infinite shelves, low prices, quick shipping—all those tenets that the company has since used to create a massive e-commerce empire that has redefined retail shopping. What Amazon did to bookstores, it has since repeated on a much larger scale by decimating the market share of once-stalwart brands like Sears and Toys-R-Us.In building that empire, Amazon found a way to re-incorporate small businesses by making its powerful shopping and shipping mechanisms available to merchants with wares to sell. The success of Amazon Marketplace is among the most significant stories in retail in the past decade, and it speaks to a concept of “local commerce” that hasn’t really been assimilated into the conversations we typically have on that topic.Now Amazon has launched Storefronts, a new entry point for SMB product offerings that attempts to showcase small businesses and the people behind them. Featuring “Curated Collections” in product categories like handmade products, jewelry, pet supplies, grocery, and books, Storefronts comes across a bit like Etsy, but it’s more like a new skin on the typical product searches we’ve become used to as Amazon shoppers, where many search results come from Marketplace sellers rather than Amazon itself. In fact, as noted on the Storefronts landing page, half of everything sold on Amazon comes from SMBs.