Amazon UK has reported selling 3m items on Cyber Monday last week - up from 2.3m in 2010. Online sales are likely to be up 
15% at £7.75b in 2011. Conversely West End stores reported takings were 10% down this Saturday at £180m. But that's just the start of the 'Nightmare on the High Street".
This Christmas, I don’t think I have bought a single gift in a ‘bricks and mortar’ shop. All have been bought online. Most (but by no means all) from Amazon. I went around Hamleys but then bought the items online (from the Hamley’s site). Same applies to clothes where I find the clothes I like in store but order online. Mainly because they never seem to stock my size. But also because I can’t be bothered to carry them around London and then home on the train.
Last week the nightmare really arrived for ‘bricks & mortar’ stores. Amazon, in the US initially, launched a scheme whereby if you had used the Amazon PriceCheck App on your smartphone three times to check prices from within a store, you would get a 5% discount if you then ordered them from Amazon. So now customers are encouraged to use shops as showrooms but to buy, at reduced prices, from Amazon online.
I must admit that I rarely do this. For example, when I was researching my latest digital camera, I visited our local camera shop. The staff were so helpful that even though I knew I could have saved £30 on Amazon I bought from the shop anyway. But I can understand why others might not be as soft as me.
I have long thought that the ‘Clicks and Mortar’ approach has many merits. Indeed M&S, Tesco, John Lewis, Apple and many others have very successfully adopted that approach.
Frankly I think the trend is unstoppable. But maybe suppliers should accept the inevitable. Why shouldn’t high street stores become showrooms? Why shouldn’t suppliers actually pay those shops to display their goods – irrespective of whether they sell them?