Amazon ruffles retailers' feathers in the US

Friday, May 4, 2012 - 10:25 by Graham Miller

E-commerce giant Amazon has been battling to secure a greater proportion of the retail market for many years, but it seems that its efforts are doing damage to its relationship with bricks and mortar retailers in its native America.

The Financial Times reports that US shopping chain, Target, will no longer be stocking the Amazon Kindle eBook reader after it made an announcement of the cessation to its staff this week.

Analysts believe that the main motivating factor behind the withdrawal of the Kindle range from store shelves is that Amazon's outlet for safe shopping online is pricing its products so aggressively, that other retailers do not have a hope of keeping pace.

Interestingly, while Amazon's near-ubiquitous eBook reader is going to be pulled from Target's shelves, the retailer will still sell rival devices.

Many experts believe that high street retailers are tired of acting as showrooms for e-commerce sites, because many people visit their local electronics megastore or homeware shop to get to grips with a product, only to leave the bricks and mortar outlet and buy it later via safe shopping online.

Perhaps most telling about this particular debacle is the fact that Amazon and Target previously had a much tighter partnership, with the e-commerce retailer taking charge of the firm's online activities. However, this relationship ended and Target took back control of its web-based destiny.

There are some, including analyst Joseph Feldman, who believe that the ousting of Amazon products could also have been caused by the influence of Apple.

This is because the Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon is doing so well, eating into a portion of the market that might have otherwise been controlled by the ever popular iPad range, which is, of course, exclusively produced by Apple.